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The Yomiuri Shimbun Traffic congestion is seen on an inbound lane of the Tomei Expressway due to reasons including ETC system failure in Nagakute, Aichi Prefecture on Sunday.
The Yomiuri Shimbun
15:57 JST, April 7, 2025 (updated at 16:10 JST, April 7)
The Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) system was resumed Monday afternoon after system failure impacted a total of 106 toll gates on 17 routes in Tokyo, Kanagawa, Shizuoka, Yamanashi, Nagano, Aichi, Gifu and Mie prefectures. The emergency restoration of the system was completed at around２p.m. and all toll gates are now open to traffic in the ETC lanes. Full-scale recovery work is continuing.
The affected toll gates on expressways such as Tomei and Chuo are operated by Central Nippon Expressway Co. (NEXCO Central) which is headquartered in Nagoya. According to the company, the system outage occurred around 12:30 a.m. on Sunday.
This is the first major ETC issue for the company since the Japan Highway Public Corporation was privatized in 2005. “We have caused a great deal of inconvenience to many people,” said Toshio Nakai, head of Maintenance Planning Division at a press conference held Sunday. “We apologize from the bottom of our hearts.”
According to NEXCO Central, the ETC system was being updated on Saturday to reevaluate late night discounts scheduled for around July. The company believes that the failure is related to this update and worked to restore the system to the state the outage. No evidence of an external cyberattack has been confirmed at this point.
The ETC system also failed at the Nagano Expressway toll gates in Nagano Prefecture before dawn on Monday. Since Sunday, NEXCO Central has been taking measures to allow drivers to pass through the affected toll gates and pay the toll later. There was no congestion near the toll gates as of Monday morning.
On Sunday, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism directed NEXCO Central to restore the system quickly, ease traffic congestion and investigate the cause of the failure.
The ETC system was fully implemented in 2001 to ease traffic congestion and other purposes. According to the ministry, its utilization rate is 95.3% as of January this year.
