SOUTHERN INDIANA — Transponder readers have been installed on the Kennedy Bridge, but don’t worry. Crossing the bridge is still free for now.
Tolls are still set to be implemented in 2016. For now, officials with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, the Indiana Department of Transportation and the Ohio River Bridges Project are trying to get a feel for how many vehicles that cross the Kennedy Bridge each day are already equipped with transponders for electronic tolling.
“What we are concentrating on now is collecting information, and we’re finding out how many vehicles using that corridor have transponders, and we also are finding out what types of transponders they have in their vehicles,” said ORBP spokeswoman Mindy Peterson. “There’s also a slew of other information that we’re able to determine: Vehicle class, home state, information on current transponder penetration rates. All of this is information that Kentucky and Indiana will be able to use to develop their tolling system.”
When tolls are implemented on the Kennedy Bridge and the two new bridges now under construction, tolls will be collected using all-electric tolling, which officials tout as superior to traditional toll plazas and coin buckets. Local motorists will be encouraged to equip their vehicles with transponders to decrease the cost of toll collection, as vehicles that are not equipped with transponders will be sent bills to collect tolls based on video captures of license plates.
The temporary transponder readers will collect data over the next three months, said KTC spokesman Chuck Wolfe. The data will be useful to New West LLC, which was hired by the ORBP Joint Board in August to educate the public on electronic tolling, Wolfe said.
“The main job of New West will be to educate the public in this area about electronic tolling and how it works, and how people can navigate that kind of a system since we haven’t had that before,” Wolfe said. “A lot of people will have to learn what a transponder is, but it will be helpful to New West to have some idea of how many transponders are already out there.”
As electronic tolling is not currently in use in the Louisville metropolitan area, Peterson said she expects that the vast majority of transponder-equipped vehicles crossing the Kennedy Bridge currently are from other communities, many of which are outside of Kentucky and Indiana.
“Certainly some of it will be, but you will have at least some people in the area who have transponders because of other places they travel for reasons of their own,” Wolfe said. “We’ll see what we come up with. We realize it’s not a perfect system, but it’ll be more information than we would otherwise be starting out with.”
The Kentucky-Indiana Tolling Body has not yet hired a company to administer toll collection. The body is scheduled to meet Sept. 15 in Jeffersonville at the Sheraton Louisville Riverside Hotel at 1 p.m.