Pa. Turnpike will begin open road tolling starting in January 2025

• By Chris Reber/LNP | LancasterOnline

Beginning next year, Pennsylvania Turnpike drivers bound for Philadelphia from Lancaster County will be tolled as they drive at highway speeds.

Starting Jan. 5, a portion of the turnpike will begin using new overhead tolling gantries located on the highway itself instead of traditional toll plazas.

Open road tolling will only be in effect east of mile marker 290, near the Bowmansville Service Plaza in Brecknock Township, and on the turnpike’s Northeast Extension. The rest of the system, including Lancaster County’s two interchanges, will continue to use toll plazas until 2027.

One of several new open road tolling gantries now spans the lanes of the highway at mile marker 290. It resembles a larger version of an existing toll plaza, with E-ZPass readers and license plate cameras mounted overhead.

Even though vehicles will be tolled differently, drivers will pay the same way they have since the turnpike went to all cashless tolls in 2021 – either through an E-ZPass account or toll-by-plate.

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.

Turnpike commission chief executive officer Mark Compton, said when the rollout was announced last month that a key goal of eliminating traditional toll plazas is to expand into new communities by adding new interchanges at reduced cost.

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.

“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, crashes and emissions from vehicles slowing at interchanges. Turnpike commission Chief Operating Officer 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 – all funded by turnpike tolls, commission spokesperson Crispin Havener told LNP | LancasterOnline on Friday.

The turnpike commission estimates the annual savings from doing away with traditional toll plazas will be $25 million, from not having to maintain them. Plazas have had minimal staffing since the switch from cash tolling in 2021, and those workers still remaining will be shifted to other jobs within the system once the plazas are closed, Havener said.

With the change, the turnpike commission also plans to change the way it calculates tolls statewide, to a uniform per-mile cost. Per-mile costs have varied on different sections of the turnpike since they opened during the 1940s and ‘50s. 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.