Client:
Riverside County Transportation Commission (RCTC)
Scope:
August 2025 to Present
Solution:
Occupancy Detection System (ODS) integration for High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane compliance on SR-91 Express Lanes
The Challenge
Non-compliant carpoolers in High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) express lanes displace paying customers, reduce revenue, and drive toll rates higher. For agencies managing high-volume corridors, manual enforcement is neither scalable nor consistent. In August 2025, Kapsch TrafficCom integrated an automated Occupancy Detection System (ODS) into the SR-91 Express Lanes operated by the Riverside County Transportation Commission (RCTC), providing a data-driven tool to identify HOV violations and protect lane integrity at production scale.
We have about 60,000 customers just on the 91. The orders of magnitude are huge and mind blowing. When you get an opportunity to go see the inside of how this works every day, I think you'll be very impressed with the professionalism and execution.
Aaron Hake, Executive Director, Riverside County Transportation Commission
- HOV fraud at volume: On a corridor serving 150,000 daily users, non-compliant HOV lane use represents a significant revenue and fairness problem. Manual detection cannot operate consistently across all lanes at highway speed.
- Image review complexity: Occupancy verification requires a different review standard than license plate capture. Reviewers must assess passenger count from images taken at speed, across varying lighting and weather conditions, with a defined standard for borderline cases.
- Integration with existing toll host: ODS data, including images, confidence scores, and occupancy counts, needed to flow directly into RCTC's existing toll host without requiring a separate platform or parallel workflow.
Project Scope
The ODS covers SR-91 Eastbound Lane 01 and Westbound Lane 01. Invision imaging hardware is mounted on existing gantry poles, with edge computing onboard each cabinet. Data integrates directly into the Kapsch toll host.
Key system components:
- Invision ODS hardware: Infrared (IR) illuminator, occupancy camera, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), edge computer, thermostat, and humidistat per cabinet
- Automated scoring workflow: Confidence and quality scores route transactions to automatic classification or manual review
- Video Image Processing (VIP) module: Manual image review interface, updated for occupancy review, with four outcome options: HOV compliant, violator, undetectable, or vehicle unmatched
Solutions & Products
When a vehicle passes through an ODS-equipped lane, the system captures a set of images and generates confidence and quality scores. Transactions scoring above threshold are classified automatically. Those below threshold are routed to the Video Image Processing (VIP) module, where a trained reviewer examines the full image set and assigns an outcome.
Where image quality or lane geometry makes a determination impossible, the system records the transaction as undetectable rather than assessing a violation. This standard prioritizes accuracy over enforcement volume.
ODS data flows directly into the RCTC toll host embedded in the standard transaction data, accessible within existing reports and audit tools.
Impact
Live on SR-91
since August 4, 2025, with measurable reduction in non-compliant HOV usage observed since deployment
Fully integrated
into the RCTC toll host with no separate platform required
Future Roadmap
includes front camera view, ODS coverage on additional lanes, and expansion to additional sites