Rebecca Fleming, her husband and five children plan on taking several trips from their Cumming home to Disney World this year.
As seasoned Disney travelers, they also expect a little inconvenience — getting hung up at several toll booths inside Florida while they scramble for cash. By the end of the year, however, that could change.
Georgia’s Peach Pass will soon work with Florida’s SunPass toll system. The news could not be more welcome to the Flemings, who have Peach Pass transponder stickers on both family cars but have never signed up for a SunPass.
“I am so thrilled, you can’t even imagine,” said Fleming, 36, when told about the impending change. “I think it would speed things up a lot.”
Whether the family is heading to Disney World or South Beach, to Key West or the Gulf Coast, windshield-mounted transponder stickers that 270,000 Georgia motorists already possess will enable them to maneuver along more than 600 miles of toll roads, bridges and causeways in the Sunshine State without paying in cash or signing up for a separate Florida toll pass. (The Peach Pass will also work with North Carolina’s Quick Pass, which covers the 18.8-mile Triangle Expressway in Wake and Durham counties.)
“The states we are working with now, their citizens are accustomed to having a pass that will allow them to move on toll roads,” said Gov. Nathan Deal following the announcement. “I think it simply makes sense that we accommodate each other.”
The converging of the systems is Georgia’s first step toward meeting a federal mandate that requires all states to have “interoperable” road tolling systems by Oct. 1, 2016. The next step is to reach the same level of reciprocation with 14 states on the E-ZPass system: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.
The cost for connecting with those states, as well as North Carolina and Florida, will be about $1.5 million, said State Road and Tollway Authority Executive Director Chris Tomlinson.
The SunPass system began accepting North Carolina’s Quick Pass, and vice-versa, in July 2013. Georgia will become the third state in the Southeast whose tolling system is reciprocal.
Getting Georgia’s toll system to work with Florida’s has been a goal of the State Road and Tollway Authority for years, said Tomlinson.
“My two kids, me and my wife will get in the minivan and drive to Orlando,” Tomlinson said. “Right now, I actually have on my minivan a SunPass transponder and a Peach Pass. But you should be able to travel with one account.”
Since tolls ended on Ga. 400 in November, Peach Pass only works on the I-85 HOT lane. But 12.24 miles of new express toll lanes are scheduled to open on I-75 South in Henry and Clayton counties in 2016. And 30 miles of reversible toll lanes will be built along I-75 and I-575 in Cobb and Cherokee counties by the spring of 2018, if all goes as planned.
Tolls on all those interstates will be collected electronically through the Peach Pass.
There are nearly 9 million Florida SunPass holders. The state has the most transponder sales of any in the nation, with about one in three Floridians possessing them, said Christa Deason, spokesperson for Florida DOT. The number of Quick Pass holders in North Carolina is about 112,000.
“Lots of our customers come down from Georgia to vacation here, and tons of Floridians have vacation homes in the mountains of Northeast Georgia,” said Deason. “So it makes a lot of sense to be interoperable with Georgia.”
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