How to Sensibly Amortize Your Transportation Costs

click on the image for a closer look
 

That is not OJ on a car chase.  That is my 2007 GMC Acadia crossing the Ohio River on the Abraham Lincoln Bridge between Kentucky and Indiana – downtown Louisville to be exact.  

Last month I posted some history about the Ohio River Bridges Project - namely the construction of two new Ohio River bridges. The Abraham Lincoln Bridge opened in December of 2015 and is located in downtown Louisville and slightly upstream from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge – completed in 1963 as part of the Interstate 65 project. 

This happens to be a toll bridge – you have to pay a toll for the privilege of crossing.  However, there is no toll collector or toll booth.  If you happen to live and commute frequently on a toll road you likely have a transponder in your vehicle for the convenient electronic payment of your road use from a prepaid account.  Crossing the bridge your transponder will communicate with the sensor and you're toll is collected electronically.  Yet if you’re me – from Wisconsin – where we do not have toll roads how do you pay if there’s no toll collector there to collect your money and you do not have a transponder-equipped automobile? 

There is RiverLink.   This allows customers who cross a bridge to register their license plate and link it to a prepaid account.  With each crossing, cameras will recognize the license plate and automatically deduct the proper toll from the account.  

If you’re simply passing-thru like me – the vehicle’s license plate is photographed and the owner is sent an invoice in the mail. Associated with this method are the highest of tolls - as administrative costs are greater. 

The bottom line is a transponder-equipped passenger vehicle pays $2 per crossing, camera recognition will cost you $3 and if you’re an unregistered out of towner - $4.  The invoice above arrived in the mail the other day - $8 for a round trip. 

This technology interests me and if you think about it maybe the future funding of all roadways will somehow be linked to vehicles that come from the factory with a transponder.