Know before you go: Surprising insights from analyzing prices of 260 tollways
The Ohio Turnpike is the most expensive tollway for cars in the US. New York tops the list for trucks.
Anyone who has driven a car can probably relate to driving through a toll and experiencing some sort of frustration, stress or anxiety. How much does it cost? What form of payment method can I use? Did I pay or will I get a bill in the mail weeks from now?
At Coord, we’re constantly trying to improve how we move from point A to B to C. When we built our Tolls API, we asked ourselves: How can a system work optimally if people can’t easily access information about tolls, let alone understand the complexities around them? One of the major benefits of our API is that we’ve standardized toll data from disparate systems. For the first time, drivers can now get a clear estimate of how much they’ll be paying in tolls on their upcoming trip.
Using our API, we’ve looked into the tolling data to better understand the current landscape of tolls in the United States. In doing so, we found some interesting patterns in toll road prices and how they are determined, including complexity of toll roads and regional differences in pricing.
Planning the cost of your road trip
A question that comes up often is which regions have the highest average tolls. Using our Tolls API, we were able to determine the metro areas where passenger vehicles will pay the most.
It might surprise you that the biggest cities don’t necessarily have the highest average tolls. This is partially due to the nature of the tollways; Cleveland sits at the center of the Ohio Turnpike, which only has a few distinct toll rates in the Cleveland metro and allows you to cross the entire state. Similarly, Albany is along the New York State Thruway, which begins at the New York City line.
These are the ten metro areas with the highest average tolls for 2-axle passenger vehicles:
Big rigs are a different story
While smaller cities top the list of toll fares for passenger vehicles, we found that the Big Apple dominates for trucks.
We believe this is due to the island nature of 4 of the 5 boroughs in New York City. If you are shipping goods, bridges and tunnels are the only ways to move goods around most of the city. Trucks with lots of axles pay extremely high tolls for the privilege of entering New York.
Here are the highest toll rates for trucks in and around New York City (excluding cash rates):
Axles x weight x vehicle type x truck height x 15 other factors = a toll-induced headache
What you end up paying at a toll doesn’t just depend on geography however. Each tollway charges based on a unique combination of vehicle type, height and weight, as well as time of day and payment method. In fact, there are more than 15 factors that determine the cost!
To understand which tolls give drivers the most headaches, we decided to come up with a simple metric to determine the complexity of toll roads: the number of unique rows for a given tollway.
To find the number of unique rows, we took our API and iterated through all possible pricing combinations for each toll, grouping by the tollway to reach a count of all possible combinations, such as vehicle types or times of day. Rather than scanning across and down a large PDF or table on a webpage to determine the toll you will have to pay, Coord’s Tolls API can find the answer with a single API request!
There are a number of single rate tollways, most of which are tied to tourist destinations and function as entry fees to the attraction. For example, the Avery Island tollway in Louisiana is effectively a gated entrance to the Tabasco production plant. And, to cross the International Falls Bridge between International Falls, Minnesota, and Fort Frances, Canada, cars pay $7 every time (that’s about $9 Canadian).
At the other end of the complexity scale is the LBJ Express in Dallas, where drivers have to pay one of 4,836 distinct toll rates!
Texas’ strong representation on this list jumped out at us. Distance-based tolling is the norm in Texas, creating a multiplying effect in terms of complexity as drivers try to find entry and exit points on the toll road — and then calculating the toll cost. With our Tolls API, drivers can identify their route and the costs before jumping in the car without sifting through various websites and maps.
Know before you go
Ultimately, our API exists because we wanted to allow companies and individuals to plan the most efficient routes and know the estimated costs. For most users, using our Tolls API comes down to saving money or time.
Check back with us as we present additional findings from our data. Next up, we’ll dive into the optimal times of day and days of the week to drive into major metros around the U.S., based on toll prices.
We’d love to know what you thought about this analysis! Feel free to email us at partners@coord.co if you have thoughts about tolls, you want to try the API, or you work for a tollway operator and want drivers of all sorts to use your toll information in novel ways.
