THEME Small Pikes

THEME

Small Pikes

People normally think of turnpikes as BIG BIG roads. But they don't need to be big, especially now that technology is simplifying and reducing the cost of toll collection so drastically. When you had to employ attendants to collect cash money through the window of a booth at a plaza you needed to concentrate the tolling at a limited number of plazas each with a hefty throughput in order to keep the attendants busy and spread the overhead costs of their wages and other employee costs. (It also meant that you designed the plazas for a certain amount of queueing of vehicles.) But with no need now for staffed booths as tolling can be done by radio signal to the in-vehicle transponder, the pass of a credit card at a swipe machine, automatic coin machine or license plate video reads, the running costs of tolling have been dropped an order of magnitude. That makes it feasible to service smaller volume tolling points, which translates into more frequent entry and exit points on the large turnpikes, or financial viability for smaller volume pikes.

This issue we report several small pike projects, starting here with a very small developers' pike in Ogden UT (see below). In the same category of being a spur off a major motorway (in this case off an interchange of the Harris Co Toll Authority's new southern section of the Sam Houston Tollway/Loop8) we have (1) the Fort Bend Parkway toll project on the fringe of Houston TX (pXXX) and (2) the Camino-Columbia truck pike bypass of Laredo TX to facilitate US/Mexico freight (pXXX)