Traffic Service Position System No. 1: Automated Coin Toll Service: Human Factors Studies

Companion papers describe the hardware and software used to provide Automated Coin Toll Service (ACTS).1"3 This paper describes human considerations which contributed to the design and evaluation of the automated service. Prior to the development of the hardware and software described in the previous papers, many questions were raised: (i) Would the automated service be an acceptable substitute for Traffic Service Position System (TSPS) operators performing routine functions, e.g., deposit request, coin counting, deposit prompt, deposit acknowledgment, and others? (ii) How would customer depositing (and other behaviors) depend on service design? 1291 (Hi) How would customer satisfaction with the service depend on the design? (iv) How would operators be affected by the automated service? These few broad questions implied many specific questions: How should performance be measured? What aspects of customer behavior are most important? and How should these be measured? The human factors work proceeded in three stages: detailed observations of existing (operator-assisted) coin toll service to comprehend the range and relative frequencies of events; a highly instrumented service trial to obtain performance measurements and customer opinions; and a data analysis and recommendations phase to formulate a final service offering, estimate performance, and isolate potential difficulties for further study. The remainder of this paper is organized around these stages. Section II briefly describes early observing studies upon which the original service proposal, as well as the provisional announcement and timing schemes, were based.