Eight months into one of tolling’s most prominent roles, IBTTA’s new executive director and CEO Mark Chung brings a career’s worth of road safety thinking to the table. He talks to Tom Stone about reducing distraction and the future of payments in an industry that has already surprised him
Mark Chung is a transportation expert with over 20 years’ experience across automotive and road management encompassing a diverse range of specialities, but there is one particular connecting thread – safety.
It is appropriate therefore that he has taken the helm of the IBTTA (International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association) just as road safety is being brought into the core of its mission. We catch up with Chung at the close of the organisation’s third annual Global Road Safety Week – an event he is justifiably proud of.
The campaign this year was built squarely around distraction, with the theme Put Your Mind in Drive. The week began with an expert-led webinar. For Chung, a past master of such events in his previous role at the National Safety Council, it stood out as exceptional: “I’ve done dozens of these, and what set this apart was the depth of conversation and the actionable information we were able to share with our audience.”
The week’s programme ran beyond the opening webinar to a set of member case studies and a $25,000 IBTTA investment in End Distracted Driving (enddd.org) an advocacy group focused on reaching younger drivers with a clear message: it is not okay to drive distracted. “Distraction contributes to about 30% of all US crashes and fatalities,” says Chung. “That’s equivalent to about 1,000 people per month losing their lives. It’s a very addressable and yet a very insidious risk.”
Behind the campaign sits Be Safe Together, IBTTA’s year-round commitment to the safety cause. Distracted driving is this year’s focus, but the commitment itself is permanent. “Maybe next year we’ll continue with distracted driving, or maybe it’s something else,” says Chung. “But the Be Safe Together commitment will continue to live on.”
“The way I’m thinking about it, the vehicle itself is going to be like a giant credit card”
As further inspiration Chung points to the Safe System Approach, adopted by the US Department of Transportation in recent years, which starts from the premise that people will make mistakes and that infrastructure should be designed to catch them. Toll operators, he argues, are unusually well placed to build that safety net.
“As operators of transportation infrastructure, we have a unique responsibility to ensure road users are able to travel safely on our roads,” he says. “We have many levers, messaging signs, connected infrastructure, smarter work zones, more innovative ways to respond to incidents. Millions of drivers travel through our infrastructure on a daily basis, and we need to make sure they can do that safely.”
Increasingly, those levers are powered by data. Chung highlights AI-powered incident detection and real-time traffic analysis as areas where operators are investing, citing the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s system for identifying stopped or slow-moving vehicles and alerting approaching drivers, particularly through work zones. “Tolling operators recognise safety as a key issue, and are deploying new technologies in the name of enhancing safe passage.”
The wider mission
Of course, Chung’s remit at IBTTA goes beyond improving safety. What inspired him to join the organisation, he says, was the chance to do something that matters at scale. From the outside looking in, he saw an industry at an inflection point: rising infrastructure needs, traditional funding models under strain, and a real opportunity to reshape how roads are paid for and maintained.
“What really attracted me to this role is the ability to make an impact,” he says. “If we do this right, we could benefit the public in terms of delivering safer and more reliable roads, and steward funding in the most efficient way.”
The future vehicle, Mark Chung believes, will be far more than a means of getting from A to B. It will be a payment platform on wheels, and that could change everything about how road use is charged.
“The way I’m thinking about it, the vehicle itself is going to be like a giant credit card,” he says. “Whether you use this road or that road, or this service or that service, it’s going to make it so much more convenient.”
The thinking crystallised over a recent dinner in Washington DC with a group of transportation leaders, several representing the autonomous vehicle industry. The prevailing view, Chung says, was that AVs will arrive more payment-ready than any vehicle before them, capable of handling everything from road use charging and parking to a coffee at Starbucks.
“As we get closer to AVs, or something close to it, we’re going to have more connected environments that enable payment systems to be very robust and pervasive throughout the mobility industry,” he says. “That is the future, and I think we’re getting closer to being more precise about how to charge for road usage.”
He points to the North Carolina proof-of-concept led by JJ Eden (covered in TTi’s November 2025 edition) as evidence the model works, bringing together OEMs, payment systems including Mastercard, and technology providers. For Chung, that convergence is also the key to public acceptance. If paying for a road becomes as seamless as any other transaction, resistance to tolling and road user charging falls away, and so, he suggests, do some of the legislative hurdles.
“When that happens, the acceptance of tolling and road user charging is going to be greater, and more easily implementable from a legislative perspective. This is all moving in the right direction, and it’s really, really exciting,” he says.
“The tolling industry is extremely tight, it’s like a family… We collaborate, we try to enhance everyone’s ability to offer safer, more reliable roads”
Driving what’s next
That collaborative spirit will be on full display at IBTTA’s Annual Meeting and Exhibition, held in Arlington, Texas this November, a little later in the year than usual. Chung is enthusiastic about the location: Texas is one of the nation’s fastest-growing states for transportation and infrastructure investment.
“The theme is ‘Driving What’s Next’, and that’s exactly where the industry is,” he says. The agenda is deliberately broad, taking in managed lanes, freight, AI, connected infrastructure, cybersecurity, workforce development and customer experience. Connected infrastructure and cybersecurity, he notes, increasingly go hand in hand. “It brings together people who are building the future.”
The Global Summit in Quebec is also coming up in September, and Chung flags that the 2027 event is already confirmed for Bangkok, marking IBTTA’s return to Asia after several years away. “IBTTA stands for international, and we are actively pursuing expanding our membership base outside the United States,” he says.
For all the talk of finance, connectivity and global expansion, the conversation keeps returning to where it began. Chung’s brief is wide, but its centre of gravity is unmistakable – delivering safer roads.
For Chung, the benefit is not abstract. It is measured in the 1,000 people a month who might one day not become a statistic. Six months into the role, safety shapes his vision, and the family he has joined is already helping him to pursue it.
The 94th IBTTA Annual Meeting takes place 12-15 November 2026, in Arlington, Texas. Visit ibtta.org/events-programs for more details
A COMMUNITY LIKE NO OTHER
If the safety mission was expected, the culture was not. Ask Chung what has surprised him most about tolling, and he thinks of the people.
“The tolling industry is extremely tight, it’s like a family,” he says. His first board meeting, just two or three weeks into the role, felt like a reunion.
What struck him went deeper than warmth. It was the willingness to collaborate on things that, in other sectors, would be fought over. Chung spent years at Ford, where safety was a competitive battleground between manufacturers. Tolling, he finds, treats it differently.
“Safety and the other basic attributes of the services we provide are at a pre-competitive level. We collaborate, we try to enhance everyone’s ability to offer safer, more reliable roads,” he says. “I had never seen that before. It’s been a very pleasant surprise.”
TOLL ROADS IMPROVING SAFETY
At the close of Global Road Safety Week, IBTTA published six case studies showing how toll operators are helping to improve safety through technology, engineering, behaviour change and operations.
1. Transurban: AI cameras detecting phone use. Roadside infrared cameras mounted on gantries identify illegal phone use at highway speed, with one North American pilot recording a distracted driving rate of nearly 13% well above earlier national estimates.
2. TEXPRESS: Road engineering to recapture attention. On the North Tarrant Express in Texas, highcontrast pavement markings and tactile rumble strips at ramp gore areas cut attenuator strikes by 87%, with two of the highest-risk sites seeing reductions of 98 and 100%.
3. Lindsay: Moveable barriers protecting work zones. Drawing on mega-projects in Australia, Italy and Japan, crash-tested moveable concrete barriers replace cones and drums, physically containing errant vehicles and cutting roadside worker exposure by as much as 63%.
4. Pennsylvania Turnpike: Speed cameras paired with tolling data. The Work Zone Speed Safety Camera programme (covered in TTi’s April/May 2026 edition) combines automated enforcement with toll network analytics, contributing to a roughly 30% reduction in work zone crashes since the scheme began.
5. Transurban: The ‘Pass the Phone’ behavioural campaign. Rather than relying on fear-based messaging, this peer-to-peer initiative encourages drivers to hand their phone to a passenger before setting off, using pre-commitment and social pressure to make safe choices the default.
6. Elizabeth River Crossings: Rapid incident clearance. Across its Virginia tunnel network, disciplined incident response and pre-positioned towing assets keep tunnel availability above 99.4 percent, reducing the congestion and driver distraction that secondary crashes feed on.
Read all six IBTTA case studies
This article was first published in the July/August 2026 edition of TTi magazine
