Forget E-ZPass. The Thruway's New York Division contract due Oct. 14 is a traffic-counter job. TDS stands for traffic data station, and the bid documents say so on every detail sheet: loops cut into the pavement, a counter and a cellular modem in a roadside box, and AC or solar power to run it.

The contract is TANY 26-26, state number D215113: "Replacement of TDS Equipment at Various Locations in New York Division in Bronx, Westchester, Rockland, and Orange Counties." Bids are due at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 14, and open at 11:00 a.m. at Thruway headquarters in Albany. You can bid on paper or through BidX, but not both. If you send both, the BidX bid is the one that counts.

Here's the work. The plan tables list 53 station entries on I-87, I-95, I-287 and the Garden State Parkway connector, from Baychester Avenue in the Bronx up to the Newburgh ramps. The Thruway's own quantity sheets add up to 162 preformed loops, 16 eight-channel and 13 sixteen-channel counters, 14 modems, 23 antennas, 15 batteries, six solar controllers, four solar panels and five new stainless NEMA 4X cabinets. Five stations get built new or moved, including a northbound-southbound pair at I-95 milepost 9.1, near Exits 17 and 18A, and one next to a traffic camera at Exit 13.

Most of the rest is small stuff: 417 feet of 3-inch steel conduit, 1,320 feet of shielded lead-in, 125 feet of directional-drilled HDPE and 19 concrete work pads. One site carries almost all of the real highway work. That's TDS-005 at I-87 milepost 3.6 southbound, where the clearing, the barrier and the box beam are.

Now the part that decides whether you can bid it. The equipment is brand-locked. The counters are International Road Dynamics TRS PLUS units, the modem is a DIGI IX-25, and the solar gear is Morningstar, Solartech and Concorde. The spec marks them "no substitutions," and the modems ship to Thruway headquarters for setup before they go in. So if your supply house can't get IRD counters, you're pricing blind.

The calendar is tighter than it looks. Completion is Nov. 20, 2027. There are no lane closures from Nov. 15 to April 1, and no tree cutting from April 1 through Oct. 31. That leaves roughly one working season, with holiday blackouts on top of it.

You also don't get paid all at once. Each station pays half when it's installed and half after testing. That means seven days of remote communications checks plus a 14-day traffic-data test, and the 14 days start over after any repair.

The rest of the paper: a bid bond of 5% or a $75,000 check. An MWBE goal of 4%, split 2% MBE and 2% WBE, and an SDVOB goal of 2%. There's no DBE goal and no pre-bid meeting. You can walk the sites with a Thruway work permit, and the fee is waived. There's no field office or staging anywhere in the right-of-way, so plan on an off-site yard. The Authority's fiber runs through the whole job, so call before you dig. There's no engineer's estimate in the package.

How old is this gear? The record plans in the package come from a 2003 Thruway contract, TANY 02-70I, which put in 27 of these enclosures and closed out at $352,759.80. The new quantity sheets are titled "Statewide ITS Element Specific Equipment Upgrades," and the Thruway advertised two more contracts under the same title the same week, one for the Syracuse and Buffalo divisions and one for Albany and Syracuse. Both are due Oct. 14.

Before you price it, send in a question. The plans put station TDS-194 at three different mileposts, and they call TDS-019 an upgrade on one sheet and a relocation on another. Nobody reads the addenda until it costs them. Read these.

What to do now: if you're an electrical or ITS sub in the lower Hudson Valley, pull the proposal book, the plans and the supplemental package from the Thruway's contract-documents page. Get a counter quote before anything else. The brand lock is the whole bid.