San Miguel Corp. (SMC) Infrastructure yesterday waived the toll fees of over 80,000 motorists in its expressways due to outage in their electronic toll collection (ETC) system.
“SMC Infrastructure sincerely apologizes to all motorists affected by traffic jams along portions of the South Luzon Expressway (SLEX), Skyway, NAIAx and STAR Tollway this morning (November 17), resulting from a momentary network outage in our electronic toll collection system.” SMC said in a statement.
To help ease traffic congestion, SMC deployed additional manpower to provide support for motorists and also opened affected toll plazas and waived toll fees.
“All in all, this covers around 84,000 vehicles that passed through the expressways from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., Thursday, November 17,” SMC said.
These include motorists whose ETC accounts were deducted upon entry. They will receive electronic refunds in their Autosweep accounts. “While the system was restored around 9 a.m., we decided to keep barriers at toll plazas up, to enable all affected motorists to pass through for free,” SMC said.
It added its IT teams traced the source of the downtime to a cut in the fiber optic network.
“We are still determining the root cause of the damage, but there are indications that a major vehicular accident may have contributed to the situation.” SMC added.
Meanwhile, toll service facility (TSF) NLEX Drive&Dine an operating unit of MPT Mobility has rollout out cashless payment through Maya’s all-in-one platform.
MPT Mobility said in a statement people traveling along the NLEX Southbound tollway can now enjoy the benefits of cashless transactions when they stop by the NLEX Drive&Dine, and rest stop along the North Luzon Expressway (NLEX), powered by the all-in-one growth partner, Maya Business.
