Toll for Mon Fayette Expressway in West Virginia

By the fall of 2010 West Virginia DOT officials say, their tail end portion of the Mon Fayette Expressway (MFE) should be open to traffic. It has been a $150m project only about 6.2km, 3.85mi long and it will have taken six years but it involves a nice 3-level 'T' interchange at I-68 the southern end of the MFE, relocation of local roads, a couple of long bridges, wetlands mitigation and some deep cuts and fills for 2x2 lane expressway.

Brent Walker spokesman for WVDOT says they have an agreement in principle with the Pennsylvania Turnpike  Commission to collect tolls on behalf of West Virginia to help with some of the costs they're incurring. Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission spokesman Bill Capone says they would be inclined to make it an all-electronic toll system and to place it on West Virginia territory, but no decisions at this level of detail have yet been made.

"We've had discussions and we have agreed in principle.

"They've asked and we're willing to help West Virginia collect a toll, but that's about as far as it has gone so far." Capone told us.

By late 2012 a motorist on the southern outskirts of the Pittsburgh area in Jefferson Hills will have a continuous expressway standard route down the Monongahela ('Mon') River valley south to I-68 just those few miles over the border in West Virginia.

The famous old steel towns of the Mon Vallley - Homestead, Braddock, Duquesne, McKeesport, Swissvale, West Miflin, Donora, Clairton, West Elizabeth, Monessen, Allenport, Brownsville, Glassworks - will for the first time have a high standard road connection to the Pittsburgh metro area to the north and to the interstate highway system to their south.

Morgantown WV people will have a smooth safe 101km, 63 mile run into the Pittsburgh metro area - at least to its the southern outskirts. And in contrast to the depressed Mon Valley, Morgantown WV is an area of economic growth.

Northern end 'Y' PA51 to I-376

At the northern end a final piece of the Mon Fayette Expressway (Turnpike 43) - a Y-plan connection to I-376 (Parkway East) in downtown Pittsburgh to the west, and to the same I-376 near the Penn Turnpike mainline in the east - is fully permitted, but the Turnpike Commission has said they can't fund it, and it's been put out for toll concession proposals.  

The cost of this section has been put at between $2.4b and $4b.

Given the Turnpike Commission's hostility to the Governor's proposal for a P3 however it's not surprising there hasn't been any rush of interest in the MFE concession.

However the now certain completion of the MFE from I-68 to Jefferson Hills (at PA51) will somewhat increase the demand and improve the financial viability of that final 39km, 24mi Y-segment, which also has the potential to be an east-west congestion reliever for I-376.

For now the MFE consists of 80km, 50mi of expressway completed with 15km, 9mi part under construction, part already open Uniontown-Brownsville PA, plus 6km, 4mi being completed in West Virginia, part built, part starting construction.

MFE goes back 36 years

The MFE already goes back 36 years!

Ground was broken on the first segment February 1973. Four years of construction saw 2km, 1.3mi of 2x2 lane expressway built plus an interchange.

Slow, slow, slow

The pace has sometimes been a bit faster than that, but the MFE has been an on-&-off, buts-&-pieces highway project ever since and the full 110km, 68 miles looks as though it could stretch to around 2023 making it a highway half century in the making.

A development road

The Mon Valley Expressway's problem has always been that it's purpose has been seen as economic development, not serving present traffic. Almost none of the corridor has the traffic now or in the foreseeable future to justify the expense of construction - which is huge because of the rough terrain. So the MFE has always needed profits from the Turnpike mainline or tax-based subsidies to supplement tolls.  And they have been hard to come by.

As far back as 1979 the governments of Pennsylvania and West Virginia signed an agreement to collaborate in building the MFE. But by March 2000 West Virginia had built nothing and the Pennsylvania Turnpike had built its southern leg virtually to the WV border. The expressway ended in a huge embankment at Rubles Run stream by the WV-PA border.

To this day 2.6km, 1.6mi of this expressway completed back in March 2000 has been barriered off from traffic at Gans Road because of the lack of any connection in West Virginia. An empty stretch of road it has occasionally been used for driving stunts for creating TV ads.

MFE is a low volume road at present - 9.6k to 12k AADT according to PennDOT 2007 traffic counts.  Even with low quality parallel routes added in total corridor volumes hardly reach 20k/day.

On the genesis of modern steel and the Mon Valley:

http://crm.cr.nps.gov/archive/16-3/16-3-13.pdf

COMMENT: The sponsors hope of course is that economic revival will generate the volumes of traffic needed to justify the expressway. Our guess is that would require a whole set of pro-growth policies in addition to improved mobility - such as reduced taxes and environmental demands that would attract business to the area. Without that the MFE is destined to be a very lightly used pike that barely covers operating costs and generates little return on the investment.

CORRECTION: Thanks to the reader who picked up our careless rendering of I-376 as I-396.

TOLLROADSnews 2009-08-07