MERCER COUNTY — If plans to toll Interstate 80 go forward, Mercer County will be home to one tolling location, said Dan Gracenin, executive director of Mercer County Regional Planning Commission.
Gracenin said Regional Planning is being kept in the loop by the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, which still needs approval to toll I-80 from the Federal Highway Administration.
“It’s either going to be between the state line and the Route 18 exit or between the Route 18 exit and the Mercer exit,” Gracenin said.
It will be one of ten along the more than 300 miles of I-80 that runs through the Keystone State. Under the current plan, there won’t be toll plazas or restricted access to the highway.
The Turnpike Commission is proposing an “open road” system, project manager Barry J. Schoch said. A photograph will automatically be taken at the tolling spots of license plates on vehicles not using E-ZPass, generating a mailed bill to the vehicle’s owner for the toll, he said.
Details of the system, which is expected to cost about $60 million, are still being ironed out, said Turnpike spokesman Carl DeFebo. “It would be the first of its kind in the U.S.,” he said.
The Turnpike Commission is still doing studies to figure out what will happen as cars and trucks get off the highway in an attempt to dodge the tolls.
Those studies will help them narrow where they want a tolling spot to go.
Depending on where the toll location is set up, it could create traffic diversion through Sharon, along state Route 318, U.S. Highway 62 or through the borough of Mercer, Gracenin said.
“It just depends on where that tolling (location) is exactly,” Gracenin said.
On Tuesday, the Turnpike Commission resubmitted an application to toll I-80 to the Highway Administration, which rejected their last application in December because it wanted more information on 14 points.
DeFebo said the chief concern of the Highway Administration was wanting to see more detail on how money would be spent rebuilding I-80.
The Turnpike Commission managed to pull off a study in the last six months that would normally have taken a year to 1 1/2 years, DeFebo said.
The I-80 reconstruction plan will invest four times what PennDOT has put into the highway and includes $205 million to rebuild just the corridor in Mercer County’s borders, Gracenin said.
There is the chance – as of yet unconfirmed – that the Turnpike Commission could spend some money re-surfacing roads or adding extra turning lanes to deal with the uptick in local traffic flow, Gracenin said.
DeFebo said it was six weeks of review before the Highway Administration got back to them in December, and with all the details in their new proposal, it could be longer before there’s a response from the federal government this time.
He added that the Turnpike Commission will not sit idle – they will continue to speak with planning organizations along I-80 and start seeking public input on toll locations later in August.
If the Turnpike Commission is approved to toll I-80, they could be the first state given permission to place tolls on a federally-owned highway using the government’s limited pilot program.
“We are breaking new ground here,” DeFebo said.
He added that no state trying out for the program has ever had the backing of their own legislature before.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
