Maine Turnpike's York toll plaza re-study report delayed yet again

Chairman of the Maine Turnpike Authority, Gerald Conley says their engineering consultants HNTB need more time to complete their study of options at the York or Southern toll plaza. This study goes on and on. In spring last year the re-study was said to be expected for "late June (2008)." By the fall it became "the first quarter of 2009." However it's still not done.

HNTB have said they need still more time and the new study will now be completed "later this spring," the chairman says in a letter to York officials, called selectmen.

The present York mainline plaza is poorly located in a low lying wetlands portion of the roadway that has subsidence problems. Built in 1969 it also has obsolete equipment, inadequate capacity, a curve making for a confusing approach, an overpass that obscures sight lines, plus an exit too near to mix highway speed and stop-to-pay tolling, according to the initial planning studies.

Just last month transponder-only lanes at the York plaza had to be closed in an effort to stabilize the housing for treadles used in counting axles for vehicle classification.

The Turnpike’s chief operating officer, Peter Merfeld, said the road surface approaching the plaza continues to sink into the wetlands in which it is built, causing what he termed "a sizable hump" where vehicles enter the toll lane.  The hump causes vehicles to hit the treadles with a damaging thump, and the treadles "need constant repairs."

From 2006 through 2007 an exhaustive analysis was conducted of sites for a new mainline plaza designed to provide open road tolling down the middle and cash collection to the sides. This produced four new sites that remedied these problems. These are in the same segment but a few miles north of the existing plaza on a long straighter stretch of the tollroad,

Cost is put at $37m to $40m excluding land.

The existing toll plaza has 17 lanes and is 90m (295ft) wide. Three  lanes in the center are reversible and the plaza is therefore capable of operating 10 lanes in a peak direction.

The plan was to build a new 21 lane plaza consisting of 4 open road toll lanes (expandable to 6) and 17 stop-to-pay lanes, eight northbound and nine southbound. Some of the February 2008 report show the new toll plaza as 19 lanes with 4 ORT lanes, 7NB, 8SB cash.

By one estimate this would be 133m (435ft) wide. And having to accommodate the safe deceleration and merge of that mix of highway speed and stopping traffic it needs to be a lot longer than the existing all-stop toll plaza.

That new-site 'solution' turned out to be politically unacceptable due to the extra land needed and local impacts deemed unacceptable. There was a major campaign locally against the new toll plaza site. By April with York officials refusing to cooperate, the Authority agreed to restudy the matter.

Restudy has produced a proposal to downsize the toll plaza from 21 to 15 lanes, providing the same 4 open road toll lanes and five northbound and six southbound cash lanes - according to one letter from the Turnpike to the 'selectmen' of York. (They deserve congratulations surely for resisting political correctness pressure to become 'selectpersons.')

It isn't clear however how the downsized plaza would be configured or located.

AET rejected

All-electronic tolling (AET) which would keep traffic flowing and actually reduce land used by abandoning cash collection, seems to have been ruled out by the Turnpike Authority and HNTB as involving too great a loss of revenue from out-of-state motorists.

The Alliance for Toll Interoperability however is making progress in improving the exchange of video imaging of license plates to support exactly the kind of all electronic collection many say is the obvious solution at York.

BACKGROUND: The York plaza is the busiest on the Maine Turnpike doing an average 45k transactions per day but over 60k during some summer days. It generates about a third of the Authority's revenue or $35m/yr. Located nearest the New Hampshire line it also has the largest proportion of out of state motorists - about a 50/50 split.

Turnpike materials on Southern Toll Plaza Replacement Project:

http://www.maineturnpike.com/about/news.php

Previous reports:

May 20 2008 report on restudy:

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/3548

March 12 2008 report on alternatives:

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/3442

July 27 2006 report:

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/1569

TOLLROADSnews 2009-04-04