PENN PIKE:America’s oldest turnpike getting ET

“The antennas are NOT going to serve as the Turnpike’s over-height detectors. We’re not going to have a truck bringing down an antenna and shutting down the system,” he says. “I don’t think this is right.”

The attachment brackets don’t allow for them to come down this much anyway. Swett thinks there’s likely to be another way. But he asks a colleague at the table to think about a worst case scenario just in case new attachment brackets should have to be quickly acquired to meet the Dec 2 deadline for startup.

How would they mount the antennas lower, he asks? (Next issue TRnl#52 will carry a report on mounting heights)

Such are the kinds of upsets that occur in the last weeks of a startup.

Meanwhile the turnpike commission is fully committed to the deadline. The public information officers are out for two weeks visiting broadcasting stations and newspapers in the Philadelphia area to brief them personally on the startup, so all the media have the date Dec 2 very much in mind. The Tierney Group, an ad agency has completed most of the ads and is into booking time slots.

Back on Sept 11 the Turnpike began accepting applications for ET accounts. In a nicely refitted but plain 20 year old single story commerical building in an industrial park in Rutherford township in the eastern part of the Harrisburg area about 20 TransCore employees in cubicles at a customer service center are tapping in telephone orders for transponders. As of mid-October they had 10k accounts established covering about 13k tags. 150k transponders have been bought from Mark IV. Some tens of thousands lay in thin boxes on grey steel shelves behind locked chainlink, inside two sets of locked doors.

The Penn pike probably bought somewhat more tags than it needed first up, they say, because there’s talk of huge new orders from New York tollsters like the State Thruway and MTA, and they don’t want to have subsequent orders delayed, backed up behind greedy New Yorkers (They are having battery rundowns from their first few years’ tags and may be ordering big batches of replacement tags, the Penn pike has heard. Our info was the replacement orders were unlikely until 2001 but that could be wrong.)

Remote sales

The Penn pike is not advertising the location of their customer service center expecting to fulfill almost all orders with a website application, by fax, telephone order, or mail-in. At Rutherford they do have a token counter for anyone who might specifically ask to come collect their tag, but they see no reason to encourage it. Located at least an hour from Philly, and a ways off the turnpike itself, the center’s location is enough to discourage most walk-ins anyway.

In the first two weeks 70% of new accounts were being established on the turnpike’s website, they said, without even the need for a CSR operator online, though of course someone reviews each web application and sometimes has to telephone the applicant to complete it. (This may be the first ET system to get the majority of its transponder applications via a website?)

One Penn pike aim is to get over 80% of customers establishing accounts with automatic replenishment from a bank account or credit card. That’s achieved by offering to waive the normal $25 tag deposit for those agreeing to automatic replenishment when the balance falls to $10. They are asked to enclose a voided check for direct bank account debit, or give credit card details. (This is similar to Lockheed’s There is a $3/year ‘service fee’ for each transponder.

The Penn pike is charging $4/month for a mailed monthly statement, but offers free access to the customer’s personal balance via a 4-digit personal identification number (PIN) at the website paturnpike.com/ezpass.

At the time an account is established the one customer service rep (CSR) does everything at the Penn pike center. She (most are women) not only takes the order on the phone but prints out the paperwork including an address label, assigns the tag number, and packages the tag and all in a bubblewrap-lined envelope and seals it ready for mailing. This contrasts with the assembly line operation we have seen elsewhere. Apparently TransCore’s idea is to assign full responsibility for each new account to just one person, so the mailroom can’t blame the CSR or the CSR blame the mailroom if things go awry.

The CS center is operated for the Turnpike by TransCore under a 5 year contract with two renewable 2 year terms.

Money out the window?

One ET marketing slogan used by the pike seems open to hostile misinterpretation. “STOP THROWING MONEY OUT THE WINDOW” is the slogan on the cover of the folder containing the E-ZPass application kit. That’s sure catchy. But is that what motorists are doing when they pay the toll to a collector? And there isn’t any discount on the toll at the Penn pike when using ET rather than paying cash.

The first transponders will be mailed out to customers about five weeks before the opening of the Penn pike system. They can be used in the interim on other facilities taking E-ZPass, such as the Delaware River bridges in Philadelphia or the New Jersey Turnpike.

The E-ZPass agreement signed by the customer has in its second sentence: “You agree to observe posted speed limits in all E-ZPass lanes.” Like other agencies in the northeast the Penn Pike is posting 5mph (8km/hr) speed limits but it has unusually large signs. Its lane equipment and system is designed to record the speed of each car’s passage and the Turnpike has prepared a graduated set of transponder privilege withdrawals to deter speeding through the toll lanes.

The agreement also states that the transponder remains the property of the turnpike, and that refunds will only be given for transponders returned in good condition, allowance made for normal wear and tear. Literature lists the 12 other toll agencies that accept E-ZPass tags.

Part of a bigger upgrade

The Penn pike has a $150m toll upgrade under way of which electronic tolling is a part. The project involves the staged replacement of virtually the entire toll equipment system, from collector’s toll terminals through host and plaza computers to lane controllers A new fiber optic backbone is replacing the old coax system, digital microwave replacing analog. Pentium based boxes (Compaqs) are replacing DEC PDP and IBM computers. Light curtains (from STI) are replacing beam photogates as vehicle separators. Cameras (from SAIC) and lights are deployed under the canopy as video enforcement equipment.

Rather different from most ET installations we have seen, the ET antennas at the Penn pike are deployed about 50' (15m) before the main toll plaza structure rather than under the canopy. They are hung from a gantry spanning two lanes, though program director Swett says they can cover up to four lanes with cantilevered arms to either side. The columns supporting the gantry are hollow rectangular steel about 400mm x 300mm (16"x12"). The gantry also supports enormous changeable message signs (3.3m x 1.8m, 11' x 6') and a signal head to indicate if the lane is open or closed. The message signs from Dambach in Germany are backlit prism type signs and are set up to read (1) E-ZPass only (2) E-ZPass and ticket (3) blank. They are calling it a ‘pre-class’ ET arrangement since the ET transaction occurs based on the class encoded in the tag and before the in-lane equipment checks on the class. Clearly the turnpike could hang vehicle detection and profiling equipment on the gantries and then they would be a near-complete ET system, and the toll plaza islands could be demolished and the present equipment in them scrapped. Not that there are any present plans for that.

Oustanding signs

The Penn pike’s large ET signs and gantries are outstanding, well worth a look as an alternative to the more usual in-canopy arrangements. And they may be a ‘bridge’ to highway speed tolling.

The December 2 or Phase One setup provides for two ET equipped-lanes in each direction at 17 of the Turnpike’s 39 toll plazas for a total of 68 lanes equipped for ET out of the total 389 toll lanes in the system. Only cars are catered for at this stage because vehicle classification (by weight on the turnpike) is not integrated yet with the ET system. The Turnpike with its usual flair for euphemism calls this the Accelerated Deployment (accelerated relative to what? Indiana?) but Phase One does cover an area that does nearly two-thirds of the system’s traffic and where almost all the toll plaza congestion occurs. Phase One includes the turnpike mainline from the New Jersey line at the Delaware River bridge (IC-30, MP-358) all the way across the north of the Philadelphia area and out west to Harrisburg West (IC-18, MP-242), and the Northeast Extension from Lansdale (IC-31, MP-10) north to LeHigh Valley (IC-33, MP-37) – essentially the area of greater-Philly’s commute traffic.

There’s heavy duty congestion on a daily basis at many of the toll plazas in this area, so ET should soon be offering motorists major relief through increasing throughput.

In the smaller toll plazas the turnpike is placing ET is on the left, and in the larger plazas it is about in the center. In all cases there are a pair of ET lanes, and of course the lanes can be switched between ET-only, mixed mode (ET and cash) or just cash.

The Penn pike is north America’s third largest trip-toll system (the New Jersey Turnpike and trip-toll stretches of the New York State Thruway are larger in volume, but smaller are Florida’s turnpike, Massachusetts, Kansas, Ohio and Indiana turnpikes, and 407-ETR in Toronto.) Traditionally these issue a ‘ticket’ to the motorist on entry which records on a magstripe the time and place of entry. Most operate automatic ticket issuing machines though some – Indiana for example – still have collectors handing out tickets!

(An Indiana ticket handout man was not amused earlier this year when I kidded him: “You’re pretending to be a ticket dispensing machine, eh?”)

The ticket is then presented to a toll collector on exit, so the full trip and the toll can be computed. Also with ET, entry and exit have to be matched on the ramps to compute the toll since there is no equipment over the mainline. Mark IV transponders are capable of having data written to them and the Penn pike will be writing to the transponder the date and time of the last pass of a gantry. That will be principally to thwart organized fraud by transponder swaps at service area stops. But the Penn pike will be relying on its central host computer and the fiber communications between all the plazas to do the matching of entry and exit registrations needed to compute a trip. So-called ‘orphan’ registrations in which only an entry or an exit can be found will generate a minimum single leg toll. Like New Jersey, the New York Thruway, Kansas and 407-ETR, the Penn pike isn’t relying on the transponder to generate trip data. (Only Florida in north America depends heavily on write-back or giving the transponder the task of carrying the entry data and account balance.)

ET here, but no ET there

There are problems of course with the Penn pike’s partial system opening. Motorists with a transponder traveling outside the Phase One area will be told in signage and a flyer in their transponder kit to take a regular ticket from the ticket dispensing machine on entry because the transponder won’t work at the end of the trip. Similarly cars coming onto the turnpike near Pittsburgh or somewhere outside the Phase One deployment area will have to pick up a ticket and hand in the ticket when they leave in the Harrisburg or Philadelphia areas even though they have a transponder. Those who get it wrong will have to deal with a toll collector or be photographed as violators.

But by sometime in late 2001 they hope to have the whole system of 39 interchanges on the East-West mainline and the NE Ext wired for cars. And in the last phase, by the end of 2002, trucks will be brought into the program.

Until this phase the turnpike will operate two separate computer systems at each plaza – the new Pentium-based system in the ET-equipped lanes but the old DEC/PDP system in the other lanes. For the systems to work properly together, the Turnpike people say, they have to bring everything up to the same standard and run on the one system.

[The turnpike has another 21 toll plazas with another 64 toll lanes on its three smaller toll roads PA-43 (Mon-Fayette), PA-66 (Greensburg Bypass), and PA-60 (Beaver Valley Ewy), all of which operate on the point-toll or barrier principle with mainline and ramp plazas. Many of these are unmanned, but some accept credit cards and bills (notes). And whereas the east-west mainline and NE Ext classify vehicles by weight at the point toll plazas they count axles, making integration of the two difficult. There are no current plans to take ET to these three low volume pikes.]

Slip lanes

The Turnpike has another important, low-cost innovation it is introducing with ET Dec 2 – an ET-only ‘slip lanes’ in the Fort Washington area’s westbound lanes. Transponder equipped cars will be able to exit and enter on newly constructed ramps to an industrial park located right alongside the Turnpike, but some distance from an interchange.

Safety gates

Another Penn pike innovation on display at the first interchange fully equipped for ET (IC-18) is a safety system for toll collectors having to cross ET-lanes. The pike has tunnels at some of its plazas but they are only used for equipment and cabling. (Lane controllers are all rackmounted in the plaza admin building.) To prevent collectors crossing absent-mindedly in front of a vehicle, the ET-lanes have safety gates consisting of a waist-height bar wrapped in bright yellow that has an interesting hinge. The special hinge allows the bar to be pushed straight ahead by a person leaving the lane. But the bar won’t swing out into the lane. It has to be raised to the vertical to get through. The theory is that if someone has to positively raise the bar, they’ll be made to think about the potential danger in the lane.

Jim Eason, ETC project manager says the safety gate is an adaptation of one used on fire trucks to prevent standing firemen from falling off.

Costs

Phase One of the Penn pike’s toll upgrade is costing $40m, but full implementation is costing another $110m. It is a beautiful system but, at $150m, expensive. By contrast in Massachusetts and Florida with systems of comparable complexity and size they are spending $40m to $50m each on ET. In those cases a mix of different lane controllers have been stitched together. In Massachusetts there are major problems reconciling data from the lanes with system data. In Florida they miss what the independent toll agencies say is an unacceptable number of tolls because of the difficulty of getting the different vintages of processors to work together. It is possible that such add-on jobs will eventually be gotten to work adequately. But sometimes tollsters change plans midway through the project, and replace equipment they thought they could continue to use. That happened on the Delaware River Port Authority’s bridges in Philadelphia, delaying a startup, but probably averting problems and the need for an extended period of software tweaking.

Such trade-offs are often not clear in the design stage. They emerge when the systems are operating under traffic.

Other big projects

The Penn pike has a heap of other demanding projects on the go. At the Mon-Fayette, its major new toll road south of Pittsburgh, a 27km (17mi) segment between I-70 near California township and PA-51 in Jefferson Hills Allegheny co is about half complete and due for opening by end-2001. Constructed through rugged old coal mine country it has some enormous bridges and cuts and fills.

On Oct 18 another important hurdle was passed with a USDOT ‘record of decision’ (ROD) on the next segment of the highway Uniontown-Brownsville. The ROD is an acknowledgement that all the studies and environmental and other permits have been obtained. It frees the Turnpike to begin final design and land acquisition.

The $360m Uniontown-Brownsville section of 24km (15mi) will closely parallel the historic National Pike or National Road which ran from Baltimore, to Frederick MD through the Cumberland Gap in the Allegheny mountains to Uniontown PA, Wheeling WV, and into the prairies of Ohio and the wild west. It is one of America’s most historic roads since it was approved by Pres Thomas Jefferson in 1806. Built with tax money, it fell into disrepair and in 1822 the US Congress authorized toll collection to fund improvements. This became a tumultuous constitutional issue. Pres James Monroe vetoed the bill, saying the US govt did not have the power to collect tolls. The three states that it passed through (PA, MD, VA) agreed to maintain it in return for agreement they should collect tolls, providing the US first brought it up to standard – in a classic political ploy played out thousands of times since. The feds said they had a ‘super’ pavement designed by Scotsman MacAdam, so it was one of the earliest macadamized roads in the US. Some of the best surviving old toll houses are located along it. (See “America’s Highways 1776-1976" FHWA p10-22) In the Unionstown-Brownsville section the National Pike followed what is now US-40. The Mon-Fayette toll road will be built less than a mile (about 1km) north of US-40 for most of its length, but it will then diverge south and at the crossing will be placed in a tunnel under the National road in order to avoid a visual dominance – in much the same manner as the Appian Way near Rome is having a toll motorway crossing put underground.

The National Road is now a Heritage Park and the Turnpike worked with that outfit to accommodate their concept for historic restoration. The Uniontown to Brownsville section will have four interchanges and involves a major new bridge over the Mon River.

It will provide a link between two already built motorway sections – at the northern end it will connect to the 10km California Toll Road (PA-43), a 10km (6mi) section opened in 1990 which has remained a small orphan spur off I-70. At the southern end it links to a short stretch of US-40 of motorway standard bypassing Uniontown and to a 10.5km (6.5mi) section of the Mon-Fayette toll road that opened March 1 this year. Work was completed by the Turnpike to the WV-line and WV has work just started on a leg to I-68, though it is unclear if this will be tolled.

The high cost due to the rough terrain combined with low traffic projections make most of the Mon-Fayette Exwy non-viable on tolls alone. It is more a toll-assisted road than a toll road. Its construction is justified by the Pennsylvania government on economic development, quality of life and safety grounds. The Uniontown-Brownsville section is only projected to get 11k veh/day by 2025 and the section further south slightly less than that. However the last section close in to Pittsburgh (PA-51 to I-376) will be a heavy duty urban congestion reliever and could attract enough traffic to be viable on tolls alone.

Figg gets concrete into steel state

The demise of steel in the state that once manufactured more steel than any other country in the world, and which is notable for every variety of steel bridge known to man is complete. Pennsylvania is building a large concrete bridge!

Eugene Figg, the nation’s doyen of segmental concrete box girder construction in the US has been hired by the Pennsylvania Turnpike to design its new bridge over the Susquehanna River in Harrisburg within sight of the Pike’s administration building. An approx $95m job the new pair of 3-lanes bridges will probably be close to a mile (1.5km) in length, slightly more than the present single 4-lane bridge in order to reduce sharp curvatures on the approaches. Though the precise alignment is not decided it will be immediately upstream of the present bridge.

The present bridge was built in 1950 and is a tight 4-lanes without shoulders. Also it badly needs redecking. With 28k veh of which 5k are tractor trailers going over the bridge per day any lane closures would be highly disruptive and night work could extend over 6 years, a consultant estimated.

The present bridge is an inelegant, busy AASHTO steel girder job built on about 40 pairs of piers. A cheap and quick job. Twinning it with anything better would be architecturally awkward. Perhaps impossible.

So the decision has been made to build a pair of new close-spaced 3-lane bridges with longer-spanning concrete box girder construction on single central piers, after which the present bridge will be removed.

The new bridges will each be easily restriped temporarily to 4-lanes to allow the other bridge to be taken out of service to be resurfaced or redecked.

Some turnpike descriptions call the new bridge a ‘signature span’ which may be a stretch given that it seems certain to be a low flat structure, and not spectacular. Enough to say it should be an elegant bridge, the smooth uniform box girder on perhaps ten sets of central piers providing a strong clean horizontal line over the interesting river.

The river underneath is not navigable, being rapidly flowing shallow water tumbling over rock outcroppings, so no long span is needed. The river is rather well contained in a defined bed 1.2km (4000') wide and has many islets and attractive wild vegetation dotted throughout. Immediately downstream is the municipal airport and the famous 3 Mile Island nuclear power plant.

And upstream? For the eastern approaches to the new bridge the Turnpike will have to buy land from... (Wait for it) Bethlehem Steel. A steel plant that makes railroad rail will be asked to cede several acres to a new concrete bridge! And the first new-fangled concrete box girder to be built in PA.

Why not a steel box girder bridge in the old steel state? Just not competitive in price these days with concrete, at least at the relatively modest spans being contemplated for the Susquehanna, they say. With modern match casting and computer controlled formwork the concrete system produces a lower-maintenance, good-looking bridge at significantly less capital cost than steel.

Third laning

Even though sections of the Penn pike have become major commuter routes most remains the original 2x2 lane format. The exception is an important stretch of the east-west mainline across the northern part of the Philadelphia area – 29km (18mi) between the Mid-County (IC-25A MP-333) and Philadelphia (IC-28 MP-351) interchanges that was widened to 2x3 lanes by 1987.

The 2x3-lanes will now be extended another 9km (5.8mi) west to the Valley Forge interchange (IC-24 MP-327). This section is carrying 55k veh/day, projected to grow to 75k by 2020. It includes a major 6-span steel girder bridge 373m (1/4mi) over the Schuylkill (pron ‘skoykill’) River that was recently widened to 6-lanes plus shoulders in anticipation of the road widening project at a cost of $35m. Construction of the $80m project should begin in 2003.

Another third-laning project is 16km (10mi) on the NE Extension (I-476) from the Mid-County interchange (IC-25A MP-0) north one leg to Lansdale (IC-31 MP-10) at a cost of about $120m. The project involves an ET-only ‘slip ramp’ just south of the Lansdale interchange. Federal money was contributed to the NE Extension so the whole drawn out federal permitting process has to be followed and a start is not expected until mid-decade. Both projects are in developed areas so the design is likely to require a lot of retaining and sound walls. Most of the original bridges will be rebuilt and widened at both levels.

Reconstruction

The Turnpike’s ‘total reconstruction’ of its pavement continues on the original 1938-1940 constructed stretch east-west mainline Irwin (IC-7 MP-67) to Carlisle (IC-16 MP-227). Work is concentrated now at the western end MP-76 to 85 and MP-94 to 99 and on either side of the Tuscarora tunnel MP-187 to 197. The old concrete slab is being removed and full depth asphalt pavement laid on top of new base and a drainage layer. They are NOT formally going to a third travel lane, except that the new profile includes a wide inside shoulder on the same pavement as the travel lanes. Full width lanes will be able to be maintained through resurfacing work in the future.

Another large job soon for decision is the Allegheny Tunnel. Alternates being weighed include complete elimination of the 1850m (6,070') tunnel with an enormous cutting and a new larger section tunnel. Hazardous materials movement and operational costs would be better with the big cut, but there’s local opposition to that, which pushes for a new tunnel.

Also under reconstruction is the head office of the turnpike built in 1957. The 3-floor building overlooking the Turnpike mainline on the eastern banks of the Susquehanna River in Harrisburg has been totally gutted and is now being completely refitted. It is also being given a new wing projecting toward the turnpike which will allow an operations center on one level, and top execs plus boardroom on another, with 180 degree views of the traffic and the river.

BACKGROUND: The Pennsylvania turnpike operates 822km (514mi) of tollroad, linking the three most important cities in the state: Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Harrisburg the capital, and other spurs off the mainline serve areas north of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. It is linked to the east to the New Jersey Turnpike and to the west to the Ohio turnpike, and carries I-70 traffic for a considerable portion of its distance, so it is a major interstate route.

The turnpike collects an average 430k tolls per day (54k of which are trucks) for annual toll revenues of $350m. Vehicles run up an estimated 8.3b veh-km (5.2b veh-mi) per year and traffic has been growing at 3 to 4% annually in the last several years. The turnpike has 2,300 employees.

Tolls are an average 2.6c/km (4.1c/mi) for cars. The last toll increase was in 1991 and an increase is long overdue. The most common criticism of the turnpike is that its directors show no independence and let themselves be manipulated by opportunistic, corrupt politicians. The turnpike’s icon of corruption is the Breezewood interchange (IC-12 MP-161) in central PA where the turnpike has refused to even study direct connections with important I-70 because local merchants have paid off prominent politicians like the champion favor-trader of the US Capitol, Bud Shuster. The main street of Breezewood is a giant service plaza, except that all the traffic I-70 to the Penn Pike is forced to divert to go through it, jamming it with traffic just wanting to interchange between two major motorways.

Squalid present leadership cannot besmirch a grand history. The Penn pike was the first serious turnpike in the automobile era. It opened its first major stretch between the outskirts of Pittsburgh and the outskirts of Harrisburg in 1940. The turnpike was a national sensation because it transformed travel across one of the US’ most mountainous states. It was a triumph for tolling and for the motorway idea, since both aspects had been fiercely opposed by the federal Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) which denounced it in the planning stage as an extravagence and predicted its financial failure. In fact it was a huge financial and political success.

It was the first road of any length in the US to be built on a totally new alignment – much ran on the right of way of a never-completed South Penn railroad. It was the first US highway to incorporate 3.6m (12') travel lanes, a continuous central median, full access control and grade separation, engineered minimum sight distances, accel/decel lanes, a maximum 3% grade and other features now regarded as commonplace aspects of top quality highway design. Hailed as ‘America’s first superhighway’ it was heavily featured in newspaper and magazine articles, newsreels and used as an background symbol of modernity in advertisements for many unrelated products. It helped generate an irresistible political demand for more turnpikes and for what became the interstate highway system.

The Penn pike was crucial in the defeat of the federal bureaucrats at the BPR who favored incrementalism in the form of upgrades of pre-existing arterials. It forced the feds, after a while, to drop incrementalism and get behind the revolutionary motorway idea. (Contact Carl DeFebo 717 939 9551x2934 paturnpike.com)