Open Road Tolling is already here? Check out the Southern Beltway.

Ed Skorpinski was still in college when he worked on the very first steps of the next big thing at the Pennsylvania Turnpike.  

“At the time, I had heard something about this being the first of many projects on the system,” Skorpinski said. “I didn’t realize the full scope of what that meant.”

As a co-op intern, and then in his first years as a project manager with the PA Turnpike, he worked on the design and construction of the overhead gantries and toll-equipment buildings that are key components of Open Road Tolling. This cashless, free-flowing system that registers E-ZPass transponders and license plates on the highway rather than at the old toll booths is launching Jan. 5 from Reading eastward on the mainline of the Turnpike and along the Northeast Extension.

But as Skorpinski can tell you – Open Road Tolling is already up and running on a newer, smaller section of the Turnpike, where he worked in his early days – the Southern Beltway. This new highway that alleviates congestion in the Pittsburgh region opened in October 2021 and was unique in that engineers don’t often get to build a new highway, let along one with a brand-new system of tolling.  

“Any time we do something that’s not paving, not a bridge and not concrete or asphalt, we get excited, and we took on the challenge,” said Construction Engineering Manager Steve Hrvoich, who led the Southern Beltway project. “And it had its challenges. There were a lot of complicated details we had to work through.”

But Hrvoich and his team had a deadline to meet, not only for opening the Southern Beltway but also for testing, and then running, the new tolling equipment that, in a few short years, would be deployed Turnpike-wide. They designed, then redesigned and reworked and tweaked the gantries and adjacent buildings, until they came up with this.  

“It took some really heavy coordination with the toll vendor, TransCore,” said Skorpinski, who was still a student at the University of Pittsburgh when he started work on the first gantry at the Findlay Connector. Like Skorpinski, the whole system was new to the Turnpike, and, “We had to make sure TransCore was getting what they needed to install their equipment.”  

Being the first, the Southern Beltway’s ORT design is a little different. With its grassy median, the tolling-equipment building is situated between the westbound and eastbound lanes rather than on the side of the highway, as it is in the east. And unlike the eastern half of the state, where the overhead gantries span across the entire highway, the Southern Beltway has two gantries at each location, one over each direction of travel.

Hrvoich pointed out there were a lot of lessons learned along the way that were passed on to the team that designed the gantries and toll-equipment buildings in the east – a whole report full, actually, like designing the buildings so various sizes of emergency generators can easily fit inside and tips and tricks on how to construct these cookie-cutter structures along different topographies.

It has now been close to three years since the Southern Beltway opened and Hrvoich is happy to report traffic volumes are exceeding what was originally planned.

“I know a lot of people who live in Washington County, and for those people to get to the airport, it’s a godsend to them,” Hrvoich said. Avoiding the Parkway West traffic by taking the Southern Beltway can turn a 45-minute commute into a 15 minute one. A highway like this is also expected to bring economic development to the region.

All while using Open Road Tolling.

The best part for Hrvoich is getting to drive on the completed highway he worked on for so many years.

“It’s only 13-miles long, and it’s over in a heartbeat, but it’s smooth and all the bridges and bridge approaches ride well,” he said. “I personally get a lot of pride and a sense of accomplishment after being part of something like that.”

While the Southern Beltway is a completed project, Hrvoich and Skorpinski aren’t done with Open Road Tolling yet. Both are working on ORT’s westward expansion as new gantry construction is expected to start soon, bringing the new tolling system to the entire Turnpike in January 2027.

By Steve Marroni, PA Turnpike Communications Specialist