After utilizing a public-private partnership to replace more than 550 smaller, aging bridges across Pennsylvania, PennDOT officials have their eyes on a bigger prize.
Nine prizes to be specific, in the form of nine large bridges spread across the state, in need of replacement and under consideration for the first round of a new public-private partnership aimed at major bridges.
The project comes with a hefty price tag, estimated at $2.2 billion for construction alone, according to PennDOT Alternate Funding Program Director Ken McClain. And PennDOT officials plan to pay for it, at least in part, through tolls.
”They’re geographically spread out across the commonwealth,” McClain said. “None of them are right on top of one another, because we have to be very sensitive about what’s called toll saturation.”
While the majority of bridge candidates are concentrated east of the Susquehanna River, the list includes an Interstate 79 bridge in Bridgeville and a bridge along Interstate 80 near Clarion and Brookville.
In addition to identifying the potential bridges, PennDOT officials have also developed a short-list of companies which will be issued a request for proposals before the end of the year. Proposals from the competing teams will be due in early 2022, with a final choice anticipated in the spring. The shortlisted firms will submit a proposal with their detailed approach to deliver the program.
Tolling to help fund costly bridge projects is just one alternate funding stream that PennDOT officials are exploring as they grapple with what McClain said is a yearly $8.1 billion funding shortfall for Pennsylvania’s state roads and bridges.
State transportation officials have received more than 4,000 public survey responses and 4,000 public comments on additional funding proposals such as managed lanes (similar to the way HOV lanes work in the Pittsburgh area, although lone drivers would be able to pay a fee to use them), corridor tolling, mileage-based user fees and general fee and tax hikes.
That process of garnering public feedback will continue in earnest as the major bridge initiative moves forward.
”There will be a public engagement period between October and January in the communities where the bridges are located,” McClain said. “And we’re going to do another 30-day public comment period after that, where all of the information and plans are available online, for people who can’t make it or aren’t comfortable coming out to a public meeting.”
PennDOT officials also have begun preliminary meetings with public stakeholders in each bridge community to get a local perspective on traffic, particularly the agency’s projections for traffic diversion — the alternative routes drivers in a community are likely to take if they decide they’d rather not pay a new toll.
”We’ve met with first responders, public works employees, and legislators in and around the project areas,” McClain said. “These folks live in these communities. They know the traffic patterns and they can tell us if our assumptions are right.”
As part of the process, PennDOT is also required to mitigate the impact of traffic diversion.
And while McClain said he realizes bridge tolling is not a popular concept, he reiterated that it is another crucial piece in plugging PennDOT’s annual multi-billion-dollar funding gap.
”Eight billion dollars is huge,” he said. “We’ve been saying that we’re hopeful some additional federal dollars will come our way. But it’s not going to fill that gap. We’ve also been working on new ways to come up with state funding, and ways to come up with alternative funding. Because none of those, individually, is enough to deal with the shortfall we currently have.”
For more on public-private partnerships in Pennsylvania, as well as details regarding work on each proposed bridge, see P3.pa.gov.
