On June 24, 1954, the first toll section of the Thruway opened, a 115-mile stretch of I-90 between Rochester and Lowell.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The second major opening on the system was August 26, 1954, when the section of the Thruway from Rochester to Buffalo opened, followed by the stretch from Utica to Newburgh on October 26, and the 15-mile section from Newburgh to Harriman on December 22.\u00a0<\/p>\n
During its first year of operation, there were a total of 8,700,000 trips made by motorists with mileage totaling 522,000,000.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the years following, additional sections of the Thruway opened to traffic. In December 1957, the final 29-mile link in the Erie Section was opened to traffic, extending from the Silver Creek interchange to join the Thruway\u2019s mainline in Buffalo. This established an unbroken Thruway route of 496 miles from New York City to the Pennsylvania state line and made the Thruway the longest toll highway in the world. The Thruway eventually expanded to its current 570-miles of roadway in 1991.\u00a0<\/p>\n
From 1951, when the first toll collector was hired to work at the Grand Island Bridge toll booth, through 2020, more than 12,000 men and women served as toll collectors on the Thruway. Offering a friendly smile and greeting, toll collectors were the face customers saw when entering the Thruway, and the last as they finished their journey on the system. They provided customers not only with a toll ticket and change for their tolls, but directions, local recommendations, answers to questions and other assistance.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2024, the Thruway Authority celebrated 70 years of service in New York State.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On June 24, 1954, the first toll section of the Thruway opened, a 115-mile stretch of I-90 between…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":127619,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10,49,51,50],"class_list":{"0":"post-130179","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-headlines","10":"tag-new-york-news","11":"tag-new-york-state","12":"tag-new-york-state-headlines","13":"tag-new-york-state-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}