Anyone who has driven State Route 91 between Orange County and the Inland Empire knows it can be one of the most congested commutes in Southern California. For years, drivers who paid to use the express lanes on both sides of the county line often dealt with two toll agencies, two billing systems, and two customer service centers. That arrangement is about to end, and the company taking over the job is much smaller than the contract it just won.
The Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) and the Riverside County Transportation Commission (RCTC) announced a three-party agreement with Kapsch TrafficCom AG (VIE: KTCG.VI, OTC: KPSHF) to merge back-office and customer service operations for the SR-91 and I-15 Express Lanes. The contract is valued at more than $170 million and runs through 2041. Both agency boards approved it unanimously.
Kapsch is a Vienna-based company that builds and operates intelligent transportation systems, including tolling and traffic management technology for public agencies around the world. Its roots go back to 1892, and it is a subsidiary of KAPSCH-Group Beteiligungs GmbH. Its North American division is based in Atlanta, with about 700 employees across 25 offices handling more than one billion customer transactions in the U.S. each year.
Here is what makes this award stand out. Based on Yahoo Finance’s latest figures and today’s exchange rate, Kapsch’s market value sits at roughly $66.5 million. A contract worth more than $170 million is about two and a half times what the stock market currently says the entire company is worth. That kind of mismatch rarely shows up in a single announcement.
The comparison needs some perspective, though. The $170 million is total contract value spread across roughly fifteen years, which works out to a little over $11 million a year on average. That is revenue, not profit. Over the past twelve months, Kapsch brought in about $493 million in revenue while reporting a net loss of roughly $34 million. The new deal adds meaningful depth to its long-term order book, but it does not reshape annual sales on its own.
SR-91 is the main link between the Inland Empire and Orange County, crossing from RCTC territory into OCTA territory near the county line. Kapsch already runs the back office for RCTC, so the plan is to fold SR-91 into the I-15 system it operates today. About 35% of customer service interactions already involve both corridors. The SR-91 lanes serve more than 116,000 daily users across the two counties, and together the corridors process more than 6.3 million transactions every month.
This is not a cold start. Kapsch has worked with RCTC on the I-15 Express Lanes since 2017, and in 2025 its role expanded to include occupancy detection technology on SR-91. The company says it has met all 14 of its contractual performance targets since the current I-15 platform launched in 2021. That history helps explain why the agencies expect implementation to take about 12 months, compared with the five years a typical re-procurement can require. Kapsch plans to hire and train more customer service staff and have both corridors running under one process by summer 2027.
On the public side, the agencies project more than $33 million in efficiencies through 2041, covering implementation, operations, and pass-through costs. Under California’s toll structure, those savings stay in the corridor and are reinvested in transit and general transportation projects.
The bigger open question is whether the work will be profitable. Long public contracts offer predictable revenue, but they also lock a company into terms for many years while labor and technology costs shift. Kapsch will also be adding staff on a tight schedule. If it delivers on time and protects its margins, a contract running through 2041 gives the company a steady anchor in one of the busiest toll markets in the U.S., which is rare for a business of its current size.
