Beginning next year, Pennsylvania Turnpike drivers bound for Philadelphia from Lancaster County will be tolled as they drive at highway speeds.
Cashless, free-flowing toll collection is coming to the Pennsylvania Turnpike instead of the traditional toll plazas or toll booths.
Starting Jan. 5, a portion of the turnpike will begin using new overhead tolling gantries located on the highway itself.
This will start East of mile marker 290, near the Bowmansville Service Plaza in Brecknock Township, and on the turnpike’s Northeast Extension.
It resembles a larger version of an existing toll plaza, with E-ZPass readers and license plate cameras mounted overhead.
In areas where open road tolling will be used, the turnpike commission plans to remove the old toll plazas at some point later in 2025.
The rest of the system, including Lancaster County’s two interchanges, will continue to use toll plazas until 2027.
Three new exits are already planned in the area set for open road tolling – two in the Scranton area and another in Norristown, Montgomery County.
Why the changes?
Turnpike commission CEO Mark Compton said that a key goal of eliminating traditional toll plazas is to expand into new communities by adding new interchanges at reduced cost.
“As when the Turnpike started in 1940, there’s an opportunity to link communities that heretofore never had the opportunity to do so,” Compton said.
The turnpike commission also built a fiber optic network for open road tolling, which has excess bandwidth that it plans to lease to internet service providers, which will in turn market it to residents living near the highway.
Other benefits include:
- Reduced operating costs,
- Reduced crashes and
- Reduced emissions from vehicles slowing at interchanges
Turnpike commission COO Craig Shuey said removing toll plazas will allow ‘right-sized’ interchanges to be more free-flowing and safer to navigate.
By the time the conversion is complete statewide, the turnpike commission will have spent an estimated $600 million on tolling upgrades, starting with the switch from cash tolling to all electronic tolling and annual savings will be $25 million from not having to maintain toll plazas.
With the change, the turnpike commission also plans to change the way it calculates tolls statewide, to a uniform per-mile cost.
About half of passenger car trips are expected to cost less in 2025 than they do today because of the adjustment, but tolls will continue to increase.
After a 5% rate hike in 2024, the commission plans to continue raising tolls by 5% in 2025, 4% in 2026, 3.5% in 2027, and 3% annually from 2028 until 2050.
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