Free flow tolling went live at the Akıncı toll collection station in the Kahramankazan district of Ankara on 24 August 2026. Vehicles now pass the site without stopping, slowing or changing lane, and the charge is deducted automatically from the driver’s HGS account. Turkey’s Minister of Transport and Infrastructure, Abdulkadir Uraloğlu, announced the switch and said demolition of the old toll canopy and booths is continuing on site.
The station is run by Karayolları Genel Müdürlüğü (KGM), the General Directorate of Highways, the state body responsible for Turkey’s motorway and state road network. Akıncı is one of 106 toll collection stations KGM operates, and one of 35 that have been converted to what the ministry calls the Serbest Geçiş Sistemi, the Free Flow System or SGS. Free flow tolling means there is no barrier and no booth at all: an overhead gantry identifies each vehicle as it passes underneath at normal speed and bills the account behind it.
Five stations converted in 2026, eight more named before the year is out
Akıncı is the fifth conversion of 2026, following Adapazarı, Sultanbeyli, Gerede and Kandıra. KGM has named the next eight: Çeşme, Kaynaşlı, İskenderun, Adana Doğu (Adana East), Adana Batı (Adana West), Mersin, Eminlik and Suruç, all scheduled to go barrier-free by the end of 2026. That would take the network to 43 free flow stations out of the 106 KGM operates.
The ministry’s stated benefits are the ones the sector always states, and they hold up: less stop-start movement, lower fuel consumption, lower carbon emissions, better traffic safety and time saved on every trip. Naming the next eight in advance matters more than it sounds, because it tells hauliers and fleet operators exactly where the queueing is about to disappear.
HGS is passive UHF RFID, and that is the unusual part
HGS (Hızlı Geçiş Sistemi, the Fast Pass System) is Turkey’s electronic toll collection scheme, issued to drivers as a windscreen sticker or as a card linked to a prepaid account. What separates it from most European tolling is what sits inside it. HGS is passive UHF RFID: no battery, no active microwave transponder. It works to the ISO/IEC 18000-6C air interface, the standard behind EPC Gen2 and RAIN RFID, in Turkey’s European UHF band of 865.6 to 867.6 MHz. That band permits lower radiated power than the North American 902 to 928 MHz allocation does, so the read budget is tighter from the outset.
Turkey’s deployment was the first full-scale use of passive UHF RFID for open road electronic tolling anywhere in Europe. HGS is mandatory across the Turkish motorway (otoyol) network, which the sources put at roughly 3,796 km across 28 provinces, and the country has moved to 100 percent electronic tolling. Background on the frequency band and the air interface sits in our UHF coverage.
Removing the barrier is a different problem from reading the tag
Nothing has been published about the specific hardware at Akıncı. No tag chip model, no reader vendor, no antenna count, no gantry supplier. What can be said is what free flow tolling normally requires, as general practice rather than as published fact about this station.
A passive UHF tag at motorway speed is in the gantry read zone for a fraction of a second. That is why free flow gantries typically carry several antennas at staggered angles rather than one, why ANPR cameras sit alongside them as a fallback and enforcement layer for missed reads and for vehicles with no valid account, and why there is a violation processing back end behind the whole thing to turn those images into charges.
Taking the canopy away also takes away the lane discipline that made the read easy in the first place. A barrier station presents one vehicle, in one lane, at walking pace, to one antenna. Multi-lane free flow presents motorcycles, cars and high-sided lorries at speed, changing lane under the gantry, with tag heights and orientations that vary by metres. “The tags already work” and “you can take the barriers away” are two different engineering problems. It is the second one, not the first, that explains why a country converts stations in batches over several years instead of doing all 106 at once.
Cheap tags are what make a nationwide conversion affordable
The economics deserve their own line. A passive UHF sticker costs pennies in volume, which is precisely why Turkey can put one on effectively every vehicle in the country. Universal fitment is the precondition for free flow: if you cannot assume the vehicle in front of you carries a working tag, every gantry becomes a camera-first system with a much larger violation back office behind it. A 5.8 GHz DSRC transponder estate, battery-powered and an order of magnitude more expensive per unit, does not scale across a whole national fleet the same way. The tag technology chosen years ago is still the thing setting the pace at which stations lose their barriers now.
More on electronic tolling deployments in our Road Tolls coverage.
