As PA Turnpike Turns 84, All Eyes on Future with Open Road Tolling

Steele is heading up the civil engineering portion of Open Road Tolling, which involves building the overhead gantries that hold the tolling equipment that will register E-ZPass transponders and capture license plate images as cars and trucks pass underneath at highway speeds, creating a smoother, safer, more convenient system of tolling. Additionally, the Turnpike will start tolling vehicles based on height and the number or axles rather than by weight and axles, which is in line with the rest of the tolling industry.

Open Road Tolling will go live east of the Reading Interchange and on the Northeast Extension at 12:01 a.m. Jan. 5. The rest of the Turnpike will follow suit in January 2027. 

Facilities Engineering Manager Don Steele is heading up the civil engineering portion of Open Road Tolling. He’s pictured here with a photo of his grandfather, who helped build the original Turnpike in the late 1930s.

The Turnpike’s anniversary on Tuesday is a great time to look back, and there are plenty of opportunities to do that. The State Museum in Harrisburg has a whole exhibit dedicated to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. If you’re in the Pittsburgh area, you can see a Turnpike exhibit at the Heinz History Center, as well. And if you’re traveling on the Turnpike, don’t forget to stop by the South Midway Service Plaza. It not only retains the look of the original service plazas, but it contains a display of Turnpike artifacts, too.

The PA Turnpike’s history is one of innovation and growth, and history is being made once again with Open Road Tolling. 

Steele said it has been more than a decade since the Turnpike announced a feasibility study to see if it would even be possible to convert a system like the Turnpike – one that’s more than 560 miles long and dates back to1940.

“We took a deliberate approach with pilot projects along the way so that we could incorporate lessons learned and make sure we were not putting our revenue in jeopardy and to make sure there were no safety issues,” he said. “The process played out perfectly, and we’re about to see it come to fruition, finally.”  

Steele’s job with the gantries in the eastern part of the Turnpike is done, and he and his team are focusing on their next steps. Four contracts have already been bid to build gantries west of Reading to the Ohio border, and that work has started at several construction sites. In the east, bids will be going out starting in December for toll-booth demolition, and that work can begin as early as March.

Though the gantries are up in the east, all of the tolling equipment is still coming online and needs to be thoroughly tested, and that’s where Jill Umstead and her team come in.

“My team manages the full circuit,” Umstead, the Manager of Toll Collections Systems, said. “That’s the installation, testing, commissioning, monitoring and performance, making sure we receive every transaction.”

Umstead said the final gantry should be connected to the fiber-optic network this week – an important step in ensuring tolling data can be transmitted to the main hub at the Turnpike Industrial Park building near the Central Administrative Office in Middletown.

Pictured below is Manager of Toll Collections Systems Jill Umstead. She is leading the team that is testing all of the tolling equipment ahead of Open Road Tolling going live Jan. 5.  

Data captured from the equipment on the gantries create a transaction with E-ZPass transponder numbers, license-plate images, vehicle height and axle counts is now transmitted to Quality Assurance servers at the TIP building near Middletown as part of the testing phase to make sure it’s all being properly processed.

Such a large project has its challenges, but Umstead said it’s moving along for the go-live date of Jan. 5.

“We don’t want any surprises for our customers come 2025,” Umstead said. “We want to make it as seamless as possible and want it to be consistent.”

She added, “I believe this is one of the biggest changes in the history of the Turnpike,.”

For Steele, it’s special to be a part of such a large project that touches just about every department at the Turnpike in some way or another. But being part of large projects at the Turnpike is a bit of a family tradition – his grandfather helped build the original Turnpike. Read all about that here:

Building America's First Superhighway | Stories from the Turnpike | PA Turnpike

“It feels great to play a part in something so important for the organization,” Steele said. “This project may take the cake for having so many departments involved, and it’s a real testament to everyone involved for how smoothly it has gone to this point.”

You can get caught up on everything about Open Road Tolling here:

Open Road Tolling | PA Turnpike

By Steve Marroni, PA Turnpike Communications Specialist