Why do the traffic arms at DFW Airport entrances lift so slowly? Curious Texas investigates

Driving into DFW Airport can seem like a time-consuming aggravation.

The booths at the north and south entrances on International Parkway require drivers to line up at booths until the traffic arms rise.

Sometimes the arms can take up to 10 seconds to lift, which can feel like ages for drivers who are used to zooming on North Texas’ toll roads without stopping to pay.

That’s why a reader asked Curious Texas: “Why do the parking plaza arms at DFW Airport lift so slowly?”

The parking plazas, each with more than a dozen lanes, are owned and operated by DFW Airport and are not part of the North Texas Toll Authority, according to airport spokeswoman Cynthia Vega.

NTTA TollTags can be used in designated lanes to pay for a trip to the airport, but the airport itself does not collect tolls, Vega said. That’s why they call the entry points parking plazas, rather than toll booths.

Most toll roads in the Dallas-Fort Worth area charge the same price for each vehicle, allowing for cars to pass through tolls much faster and with ease. But at DFW, going through the parking plaza is a multi-step process.

When a driver is stopped at the booth at DFW Airport, the airport’s system takes a picture of the car and license plate to track when a car enters and leaves the airport. Exiting the airport grounds takes a little longer because the system calculates a unique charge for each car based on how long it was at the airport, which may cause a delay in lifting the arm.

Another reason why the arms may lift slowly is that each parking plaza has more than a dozen lanes that quickly merge into three once on International Parkway. The arm lift allows the cars to funnel into three lanes at a slower speed.

“It would be unsafe to allow cars to pass through our plazas at the speed they do while on toll roads given the significant reduction in lanes post-exit,” Vega said.

Having a TollTag is one of the more convenient ways to get through the plazas, according to the airport’s website. TollTag readers are above the cars as they pull into the booth and scan once a car is stopped underneath. The best way for the system to read a tag is to pull up “quite close” to the arms, Vega said.

The parking plazas are part of a parking system first implemented in 2013.

When the system first launched, a glitch in the system’s ability to read TollTags caused long wait times and frustrated drivers. Some customers were once overbilled in the system’s early days.

Before the update, drivers had to stop at a booth and take a ticket from an attendant. Now, drivers can use lanes designated for TollTags. Drivers without TollTags can still grab a ticket and pay by inserting a credit or debit card into a machine or hand the ticket and payment at a staffed exit booth.

Vega said the airport continues to upgrade the software for recognizing license plates to improve accuracy.

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