The I-79 bridge in Bridgeville is among nine bridges throughout the state that PennDOT is considering turning into toll bridges as part of the state's "Major Bridge P3 Initiative."
PennDOT District 11 Rep Cheryl Moon-Siriani says the Bridgeville project has been on their wish list for a while. "We have wanted to do that project and we wanted to construct it prior to the southern beltway being completed, but we did not have any funding for it."
“Our reliance on funding models from the last century leaves us especially vulnerable to fund losses stemming from volatile economic conditions and the increasing transition to alternative-fuel or electric vehicles,” PennDOT Secretary Yassmin Gramian said. “This initiative will help us make much-needed improvements without compromising the routine projects our communities and industry partners rely on.”
PennDOT's Alexis Campbell says tolling wouldn't start until at least 2023, and each project has to now complete a rigorous environmental review process to proceed. "We're also looking at the impact of a toll on those communities, so each individual project is gonna be evaluated more closely now."
She says they'll evaluate if a toll is feasible in the area. "These are projects that we think would work well, but we still have a lot of evaluating to do before we know exactly when tolls would begin, what those rates would be and even whether any of the bridges would kind of survive that process."
Under the program, the money raised by the tolls would reimburse PennDOT which would pay private contractors to repair and maintain bridges for 20 to 30 years.
Tolls would be collected through the Pennsylvania Turnpike E-ZPass program or license plate billing.
Related
Other bridges being considered include:
I-78 Lenhartsville Bridge Replacement Project (Berks County)
I-80 Canoe Creek Bridges (Clarion County)
I-80 Nescopeck Creek Bridges (Luzerne County)
I-80 North Fork Bridges Project (Jefferson County)
I-80 Over Lehigh River Bridge Project (Luzerne and Carbon counties)
I-81 Susquehanna Project (Susquehanna County)
I-83 South Bridge Project (Dauphin County)
I-95 Girard Point Bridge Improvement Project (Philadelphia County)
The yearly budget for highway and bridge construction is just under $7 billion a year, which PennDOT says is less than half of the $15 billion needed to keep roads and bridges in the state in good repair.