NTTA · Working Proposal
Internal review · v1 · 2026-04-29
Working Proposal — NTTA
For Paul Steinberg, ahead of the exploratory conversation with Jeff Dailey (AED Operations) and Dan, NTTA. Socratic in style — surface NTTA's own thinking first, then position Carma as a fit to it.
This is the frame Paul leads with. It is deliberately customer-first and avoids naming any of NTTA's operational pain points directly. The pain points are mirrored back to NTTA through the language Paul uses about the driver experience — so when Jeff and Dan hear it, they recognise their own thinking before they identify it as a sales frame. Carma's commercial story lands as a consequence of the customer story, not as the lead.
The shift in the driver's relationship with their journey
- Drivers in 2026 are asking different questions of every dollar they spend on the road than they were three years ago. Gas prices, household budgets, and a louder consumer voice online have made transparency a baseline expectation rather than a premium feature.
- The driver wants to know what they are paying, when they are paying, and why — as the trip happens, not weeks later in a statement.
- Authorities that meet drivers where they are — in-vehicle, in real time, in plain language — earn trust. Everyone else absorbs the friction, in inbound calls, in disputes, in press, and increasingly in court.
- This is not primarily a technology conversation. It is a customer relationship conversation that happens to be enabled by technology.
Where Carma sits
- Carma's product is designed around a single idea: make the tolling experience disappear into the driving experience.
- The driver pays the lowest available rate, sees the cost as it happens, and never has to think about whether anything is going to show up in the mail later.
- Behind that experience, the authority gets cleaner conversion to its best-rate products, fewer downstream exceptions to manage, and a direct, individual communication channel to every driver on its network.
- Same product, two outcomes: the driver feels in control, and the authority sees its cost-to-serve drop.
Why this matters for NTTA specifically, right now
- NTTA already has the prepayment rails in place — TollTag, Pay-by-Plate (Registered License Plate), and ZipCash AutoPay. Three tiers that already reward drivers for engaging digitally.
- What is missing is the layer that meets the driver in the moment: an in-vehicle, real-time surface that converts a casual driver into a prepaid customer at the moment of first contact, not after a paper invoice arrives weeks later.
- Carma is that layer — Apple-approved for CarPlay, working today, and structurally aligned with the modernisation roadmap NTTA has already committed to publicly.
- The conversation we want to have is about how that layer plugs into what NTTA is already building — not about replacing anything, not about taking anything off the table. Just about extending NTTA's reach into the part of the trip where the relationship with the customer is actually formed: the drive itself.
The frame for the rest of this conversation
- Three areas where we think Carma can add the most value to what NTTA already has in motion: the way drivers are converted into prepaid customers; the cost of the trips that are not; and the conversation NTTA is having with the driver between the trip and the bill.
- A fourth area — the longer-arc roadmap conversation around GPS tolling, CV2X, and connected-vehicle infrastructure — sits underneath all three and is worth touching on if time allows.
- We want this to be a discussion, not a pitch. Where our thinking and yours overlap, we want to find the edges. Where it does not, we would rather know early.
Reframed: not a ZipCash replacement — the in-vehicle conversion surface that feeds NTTA's existing prepaid products.
The economic case underneath the conversion story — what shifting customers to prepaid does to the cost ladder.
Reframed: not a TollMate competitor — Carma serves the segments TollMate structurally does not reach.
Longer-horizon: Carma as a credible partner for parts of NTTA's public roadmap beyond the next twelve months.
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