Driving along the eastern half of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, you may have noticed what's called gantries - metal beams spanning across the highway, supported by stone pillars on either side with an adjacent, matching building.
Those are gantries, and they are part of open road tolling, according to Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Turnpike Senior Project Manager Steve Brousse is leading the teams that are designing and constructing the gantries, where tolls will soon be read as traffic passes underneath at highway speeds rather than slowing down at the old toll plazas. He explains how it all works and gives us a peek behind the scenes in the video below.
Open Road Tolling is an immense project, covering all 564 miles of the Turnpike, so it had to be broken down into several phases with several contractors performing the design and
construction work, according to the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
It started with four engineering firms designing the gantries and adjacent buildings that house the electronic equipment east of the Reading Interchange and along the Northeast Extension.
Those sites will be going live with Open Road Tolling in January 2025, shortly followed by the demolition of the old toll plazas in that section of the Turnpike, creating safer interchanges with less congestion, according to the news release.
They say it not only is more convenient for travelers, but it also gives the Turnpike greater flexibility in building new interchanges across the system.
Photo courtesy Pennsylvania Turnpike
Pictured above is PA Turnpike Senior Project Manager Steve Brousse. He is leading the teams that are designing and constructing the gantries that are a part of Open Road Tolling.
Courtesy Pennsylvania Turnpike
“We’re going to be able to grow as an organization as the community grows around us,” Brousse said. “Open Road Tolling will allow us to add interchanges more efficiently.”
Open Road Tolling is expected to go live on the rest of the Turnpike in January 2027, and the wheels are already turning on the four contracts to construct 19 gantries there.
Turnpike Commissioners approved the first contract with a bid price of $17.8 million earlier this month. A second contract is pending approval and the remaining two will be going out to bid soon.
“Fingers crossed, if everything goes well, we’ll be knee-deep in construction this summer,” Brousse said.
Being a part of such a large project is exciting for Brousse, not just as an engineer, but also as a part of the Turnpike’s 80-plus-year history.
“Being the project manager on such an important aspect of our system is great,” Brousse said. “I alone can’t do it. I do rely heavily on all of our liaisons and construction folks, but it’s been great to be a part of a project that I’ll see for the next 40 years.”