Skip to main content

Oklahoma turnpikes go cashless

OTA says there were 500 crashes at toll booths from 2015-21
By Adam Hill November 26, 2024 Read time: 2 mins
OTA says PikePass is the most cost-effective way to travel Oklahoma turnpikes (© Trong Nguyen | Dreamstime.com)

Tolling is now cashless on all 12 Oklahoma turnpikes - a conversion process which cost nearly $60 million over the last seven years.

Users will now pay via PikePass and PlatePay.

The last one to switch to open road tolling was the I-44/Will Rogers Turnpike corridor between Tulsa and the Missouri state line.

It means that motorists can travel through cash lanes and pay them later online instead, with signage in place alerting drivers to keep moving.

Demolition of the toll booths and toll plaza areas is expected to begin after Thanksgiving, and this will lead to some lane closures, says Oklahoma Turnpike Authority (OTA).

Safety was a factor in the move to all-electronic tolling: OTA says there were more than 500 crashes at tolling booths in the six years up to 2021.

PlatePay cameras photograph a vehicle’s licence plate, enabling the authority to send the vehicle’s registered owner an invoice.

Motorists without a PikePass will receive a bill in the mail or can pay online at www.platepay.com "about five days after travelling a turnpike".

OTA says PikePass is the most cost-effective way to travel Oklahoma turnpikes, and its toll tag offers seamless travel on turnpikes within states including Kansas, Texas and some toll roads in Colorado and Florida. 

The conversion began with testing on a small section of the Creek Turnpike in Tulsa in 2017. By 2021, the John Kilpatrick Turnpike corridor in Oklahoma City was the first to convert to cashless tolling. 

Related Content

  • September 8, 2014
    Rapid growth makes Texas an incubator for tolling innovation
    As the IBTTA’s annual meeting and exhibition heads for Austin, Mitchell Beer, president of Smarter Shift, considers the role of Texas in the development of tolling strategies and technology. The State of Texas has always prided itself on being ‘larger than life’. From the sprawling geography of the state itself with its wide open skies, to its entrepreneurial ‘get-it-done’ attitude, Texas exudes an impatient restlessness that pushes businesses and public agencies to deliver faster, better results. More ofte
  • March 13, 2025
    Hawaii DoT begins issuing driver speed warnings
    10 intersections already have red-light running detection in downtown Honolulu
  • December 4, 2013
    Alliance stages North American back office interoperability trial
    JJ Eden, President and CEO of the Alliance for Toll Interoperability, talks to Jason Barnes about the new inter-agency hub, which will facilitate national transactions When it comes to achieving interoperability, the sheer diversity of technologies in operation in the US is perhaps the tolling industry’s greatest defining characteristic and its biggest challenge. The situation is in stark contrast with some other regions of the world, such as Europe where the use of common front-end Dedicated Short-Range
  • July 30, 2013
    Geotoll’s payment app could be the smart answer to tolling interoperability
    Jon Masters looks at a smartphone app which could be the ‘disruptive technology’ that eases the way to interoperability in tolling systems. Consumer demand may soon drive the biggest step change yet in tolling. In the United States a new start-up company, Geotoll, has launched a smartphone app for electronic toll payment. It is not beyond possibility that rapid growth of the market for smartphones will continue – an estimated 50% of US citizens and 80% of Europeans now have one – and that the Geotoll brand