Polk Parkway

Florida DOT’s latest toll road, the Polk Parkway (FL-570) had embarrassingly little traffic when it first opened in August 1998. But traffic has built steadily and it is now doing 11.4k, 9k and 3k/day at its three mainline toll plazas. We visited a weekday afternoon and it was busy if not crowded. A toll superintendant told us the traffic had been disappointingly light to start with but has grown month by month since. A 40km (25mi) roadway the Polk Pwy ends goes I-4 to I-4 looping around Lakeland to collect and distribute traffic hitting the itnerstate system as well as catering to local trips. It presently has eleven interchanges but provision for another 14. It has a mix of barrier and ramp plazas forming a closed system. It cost about $240m. The north-eastern portion linking to I-4 in the Orlando direction is lightly trafficked (that 3k!) but is only built to a 2-lane single carriageway at this point. The rest is a generous 2x2lanes motorway in a rural scale right of way.

The mainline plazas collect $1 from cars and the ramp plazas, mostly unmanned have coin machines set for 25c and 50s. Two out of three times we used the ramp plazas and threw coins in the coin-machine baskets they hung up and we set off the violation alarm. A car ahead did the same in one instance. They were getting a lot of violation pictures that afternoon!

Lakeland is between the Tampa area and the Orlando area, but closer to Tampa and far more closely integrated with it than with Orlando, though Lakeland residents commute both directions.

The toll works out at about an average 7.5c/km cars (12.5c/mi). FDOT builds the world’s strongest toll plaza canopies - out of poured reinforced concrete. To resist hurricanes, we guess.