Press Releases

For Immediate Release

New Benicia-Martinez Bridge Prepares
For Bay Area Debut of Open-Road Tolling

Contact:
Rod McMillan, MTC/BATA 510.817.5860
John Goodwin, MTC/BATA 510.817.5862

OAKLAND, Calif., Jan. 16, 2007… The opening of the new Benicia-Martinez Bridge later this year will mark the Bay Area debut of open-road tolling, which allows vehicles equipped with FasTrak® electronic toll tags to bypass the toll booths altogether and cross the span without slowing down. To make way for the installation of open-road tolling equipment, the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) this week will begin demolishing a portion of the toll plaza on the Martinez side of the new bridge.

The $1.1 million project will remove eight toll booths on left side of the 17-lane toll plaza and replace them with two express open-road tolling lanes for FasTrak-equipped vehicles and one dedicated high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane. Twelve-foot buffers will separate the open-road tolling lanes from the shrunken toll plaza on the right and from the HOV lane on the left. A video simulation of the new toll plaza configuration can be seen on the BATA Web site at bata.mtc.ca.gov/projects/new_benicia.htm. Demolition and reconstruction work will be completed in time for the opening of the new bridge in late 2007.

“This project is part of moving toll collection out of the 20th Century and into the 21st,” stated Rod McMillan, BATA’s director of Bridge Oversight and Operations. “When the new bridge and the toll plaza were designed back in the 1990s, FasTrak was still in its infancy and open-road tolling was not a consideration. Now FasTrak use is skyrocketing. And if open-road tolling proves to be as popular as we expect, we could end up someday doing partial demolitions of toll plazas all around the Bay Area.”

The open-road tolling initiative is part of the FasTrak Strategic Plan that BATA adopted in June 2006 to expand and improve electronic toll collection in the Bay Area. The plan’s goals are to make the toll plazas at the region’s toll bridges function more efficiently, and to boost the percentage of motorists who use FasTrak, which can be used in all lanes at all Bay Area toll plazas.

This coming summer, BATA will convert more cash lanes at the Carquinez, Dumbarton, Richmond-San Rafael, San Mateo-Hayward and San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridges to FasTrak-only lanes. This will be accompanied by lane striping and signage improvements to separate FasTrak traffic and cash tollpayers as far in advance of the toll plazas as possible. In addition, the Strategic Plan calls for FasTrak-only lanes to be grouped together at the left side of the toll plazas to the extent feasible, with cash lanes to the right side of the toll plazas and plaza approaches. The complete FasTrak Strategic Plan is available on the BATA Web site at bata.mtc.ca.gov.

MTC is the transportation planning, financing and coordinating agency for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. BATA, which is directed by the same policy board as MTC, administers toll revenues from the Bay Area's seven state-owned toll bridges. Toll revenues from the Golden Gate Bridge are administered by the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, which joined with BATA to operate a single regional FasTrak customer service center in San Francisco.

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