Nowadays Electronic Tolling Collection (ETC) has become a major part in the development of modern intelligent transportation systems. Policy makers wish to replace the existing man-powered toll collection with ETC in an effort to increase the efficiency of toll collection, decrease fuel consumptions and pollutions, as well as collection of traffic raw data to support real-time information. Despite the advantages, ETC has not been widely accepted by the general public. Instead, it had become a controversial issue, generating many debates over its usage. It has fallen into a hidden ?chasm? common for new products. In theories related to technology acceptance, nearly all new innovations are faced with the difficulty of crossing the ?chasm?. Unless they become well received by the public and get over the ?chasm?, the new inventions will quickly fade out of the market. In retrospect, most literatures analyze the ?chasm? problem from a single perspective, either from the aspect of adopting or resisting a certain technology but the truth is when a new product is challenged with the ?chasm?, it is often confronted with both opposing forces. Thus, this research, primarily based on the theory of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) proposed by Davis, combining with the positive factor (Innovation Adoption) of Rogers and the negative factor (Innovation Resistance) of Ram, looks at the ?chasm? obstacle faced by ETC. The problem is further analyzed using linear structural relationships (LISREL) to model the development process of ETC in an effort to draw up a strategy for crossing the ?chasm?. The research result shows both innovation adoption and innovation resistance attitude towards ETC co-exists, with the innovation adoption being more predominant. Drivers using ETC (innovation adoption) place the greatest importance on the usability factor and place the least importance on the availability of ETC trial whereas the most important and least important factors for non-adoption (innovation adoption) are economic barrier and image barrier respectively.
