The Pennsylvania Turnpike\u2019s annual toll increase will drop slightly to 3.5% in January, the lowest increase since 2014.<\/p>\n
The state Turnpike Commission approved the toll hike in a unanimous vote Tuesday. The increase marks the 19th year in a row that the commission has raised rates, largely to pay off long-term debt it accumulated by borrowing money to make payments to the state Department of Transportation to cover part of the cost of public transit.<\/p>\n
The increase that takes effect Jan. 3 will raise the cost of driving on the turnpike for passenger vehicles that use the E-ZPass transponder from 7.3 cents a mile driven to 7.5 cents, plus an increase from $1.13 to $1.17 for each overhead toll gantry a driver passes under.<\/p>\n
Drivers who use the Toll-by Plate system, where the turnpike takes a photo of a driver\u2019s license plate and sends them a bill in the mail, will see double the increase, from 14.6 cents a mile driven to 15 cents a mile, plus increasing the toll per gantry from $2.26 to $2.34.<\/p>\n
The cost from Wilkes-Barre to Mid County in a passenger vehicle with E-ZPass will increase around 42 cents and the total for the trip will be $14.56.\u00a0 The cost from Clarks Summit to Mid County would be around $20.18.<\/p>\n
Richard Dreher, the turnpike\u2019s chief financial officer, noted in an interview that even with the increase the turnpike\u2019s cost for passenger vehicles will be 18 cents a mile. That ranks 19th out of 47 toll agencies across the country and is below the average of 20 cents a mile.<\/p>\n
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Pennsylvania Turnpike\u2019s annual toll increase will drop slightly to 3.5% in January, the lowest increase since 2014.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":238636,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[182,139,28,30,29,802,2155],"class_list":["post-238635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-top-stories-cvc","tag-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}