Editorial: Pa. Turnpike fares unfair to some users

Why can’t Pennsylvania just make a toll road that costs the same no matter how you pay for it?

The Pennsylvania Turnpike can be a costly way to get from here to there. Use an E-ZPass — the transponder system that reads your account and deducts pre-deposited funds when you go through an automated booth — and you pay 0.129 cents per mile. If you are driving from one side of the state to the other, that certainly adds up.

If you don’t have an E-ZPass, the state still charges you for using the road, as it should. It uses a Toll-by-Plate system that photographs your license plate, looks up your information and sends you a bill in the mail. That bill will be more than twice as much, 0.265 cents per mile.

Why? According to the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, it’s deliberate. The point is to encourage you to get an E-ZPass.

That isn’t a good enough reason to gouge a portion of users — Pennsylvanians and outside travelers — for not using the system.

Turnpike CEO Mark Compton said the cost has to “offset the higher cost to collect” tolls from those not using E-ZPass. Perhaps that would make sense if E-ZPass customers were initially charged more to cover the cost of that system in 2000 when it was implemented, with people still tossing quarters in the hopper or handing over cash to an attendant paying less.

To illustrate how unfair the tolling is, one need only look to the state’s neighbors.

While we are all used to complaining about the tolls and the clockwork regularity of how they rise with every New Year, Pennsylvania does not have the highest tolls in the region. While New York has the lowest at 0.049 cents a mile and Ohio is just 0.058 cents per mile, West Virginia costs a fraction of a penny more at 0.136 cents per mile. New Jersey pulls ahead at 0.161 cents per mile.

But when it comes to non-E-ZPass rates, Pennsylvania is top dog. Where the Keystone State charges nonusers twice as much, in Ohio, the added cost is less than 50%.

If other states can be more fair with their fares — offering more of a discount for using the E-ZPass than a punishment for not doing so — Pennsylvania can too. The Turnpike Commission appears to have become so used to railroading increases through regularly, it doesn’t realize that every penny is one more reason to not use the toll road in a state with about 40,000 miles of other state- maintained roads.