toledoblade.com --

Northern Ohio's sluggish economy and gasoline's soaring price are taking their toll on the Ohio Turnpike.

While revenue is up in 2007 because of toll increases back in January, traffic is down for the first 10 months of the year.

Gary Suhadolnik, the turnpike's executive director, attributes that to reduced automotive and construction-industry trucking and less leisure travel among motorists.

The $167.7 million in tolls the turnpike collected through October is 2.7 percent below budget, toll-road comptroller Jim Steiner said, and officials believe that decline could deepen to as much as 3.4 percent by year's end if rising gasoline prices put a crimp in holiday travel.

Because revenues are below budget, several capital projects will be postponed - most notably, the reconstruction of two service plazas in Williams Coun-ty that were torn down early last year, Mr. Suhadolnik told Gov. Ted Strickland and state legislative leaders in letters early this month.

"We had hoped to begin construction of new service plazas" in 2008, but sufficient funds are unavailable, the turnpike director wrote.

If the cost of installing an E-Z Pass automated toll-collection system proves lower than expected or revenues rebound, Mr. Suhadolnik said in both the letter and a telephone interview yesterday, then the service-plaza reconstruction could be accelerated again.

But as things stand, he said, rebuilding the plazas might not start before late 2009.

Also on hold is the turnpike's completion of its 160-mile campaign to widen the toll road from two lanes to three in each direction.

A new section of the "third lane" opened last week between I-280 near Stony Ridge and a point just west of I-75 in Perrysburg. But building the western-most five miles of the turnpike plan, first announced back in 1995, to widen all the way to Reynolds Road (U.S. 20) in Lucas County and filling a seven-mile gap southeast of Cleveland are both suspended for "several years down the road - it may be '11 or '12 before we have that done," Mr. Suhadolnik said.

Turnpike tolls rose Jan. 1 by 13.5 percent for cars and light trucks and by 7.8 percent for the weight class covering the most common loaded tractor-trailers, but Mr. Suhadolnik said he does not believe those rate increases pushed a significant number of vehicles off the toll road.

"We have no indication that anybody is running to the parallel routes," he said. "If those cities were seeing it, they would be telling us about it."

Instead, the turnpike director attributes this year's 2.3 percent decline in car/light-truck mileage to reduced leisure travel, and a 1.1 percent decline in the other toll classes to the sluggish economy.

While people still have to commute no matter what gasoline costs, he said, leisure travel declines when times are tough, and outside of some short stretches near Cleveland the turnpike carries few commuters.

The Ohio Turnpike's relatively low commuter base is also why turnpike officials have put off installing a transponder-based, automated toll system until now, offering instead a debit card option to frequent travelers.

But the turnpike now expects to spend as much as $50 million over the next two years to install an E-Z Pass system, which would allow motorists to drive from Chicago to New York, over as many as a half-dozen toll roads and bridges, without ever stopping at a toll booth.

Mr. Suhadolnik said Ohio's E-Z Pass project is going to be "a tailor-made system for our toll road. We have some estimates, but we really don't know for sure what it's going to cost."

For now, the turnpike director said, there is no plan to create bypass lanes at major toll plazas to allow E-Z Pass customers to drive through without slowing down, as has been done at main-line turnpike plazas in New York and Pennsylvania.

So while designated lanes will be for E-Z Pass only at many locations, motorists using the system still will have to slow down to drive through the toll plazas.

Contact David Patch at:
dpatch@theblade.com
or 419-724-6094.

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