Indiana Toll Road – The Marketing Strategy
The Indiana Toll Road was publicly financed and constructed during the 1950s. It opened in stages, east to west, between August and November, 1956[4]. The formal dedication ceremony was held on September 17, 1956. The final course of the Toll Road was the northern of four planned alignments.
In addition to the “east-west” toll road, a “north-south” toll road was planned, roughly along the path of today’s Interstate 65, but the plan was dropped after the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 was passed.
Originally the Interstate 94 designation was applied to the highway west of where the current interchange with I-94 was eventually built, with I-90 following I-80 to the west along the Borman Expressway as I-94 does now, the completed portions of the Borman being designated as I-80, 90, and 294. The current arrangement was applied around 1965, to avoid confusion, resulting in a stretch of I-94 actually being farther south than I-90, and I-90 running the entire length of the Indiana Toll Road. I-294 was cut back to the Tri-State Tollway at that time.
The Indiana Toll Road, officially the Indiana East-West Toll Road, is a tolled highway running east-west across the northernmost part of Indiana. It is a part of the New York-Chicago Toll Road system, and has been advertised as the “Main Street of the Midwest”.
To the west, it leads directly to Chicago, Illinois via the Chicago Skyway; to the east it leads toward Toledo, Ohio via the Ohio Turnpike.
It is owned by the Indiana Finance Authority and operated by the Indiana Toll Road Concession Company, a joint-venture between Spanish Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte and Australian Macquarie Infrastructure Group.
The Indiana Toll Road (I-80 and I-90), a four-lane super highway, extends 157 miles across northern Indiana, parallel to the Indiana/Michigan border. The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) Toll Road District’s 500 employees ensure that the toll road remains one of the safest and best maintained interstate highway facility in the nation.
Between the Westpoint barrier toll, near the Illinois state line, and the Portage barrier at mile post 23, tolls are collected by fixed-amount tolls at exit and entrance ramps.
Between the Portage barrier, east to the Eastpoint barrier toll, near the Ohio state line, it is operated as a closed ticket system toll road, where one receives a ticket upon entering and pays a pre-calculated amount based on distance traveled when exiting. Standard passenger cars are charged a toll of $4.15 for i-Zoom users and $6.75 cash along the section from Portage to Eastpoint, with an extra $0.50 for i-Zoom users and $1.25 cash at the Westpoint barrier.
Originally the entire toll road was on a closed ticket system, with Westpoint at current Exit 5, roughly under the East 141st Street overpass. This changed after the INDOT takeover in 1981. (see the History section).
Effective June 25, 2007, the Indiana Toll Road began electronic toll collection with the i-Zoom system. i-Zoom is fully compatible with the E-ZPass and I-Pass electronic toll collection systems. Indiana becomes the 12th state to use the E-ZPass system.
Indiana became the first state to privatize a major highway in 2006, when it handed over the toll road’s operation and profits to an overseas consortium through 2081.The firms, Cintra of Spain and Macquarie of Australia, gave Indiana $3.8 billion, which the state is using for roads.
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