Bay City's Independence Bridge has officially joined the Liberty Bridge in charging a toll to cross both ways.
Tolls for those who live outside of the city without a transponder begin at $5.50, going up to as much as $11.50 per crossing, depending on vehicle size. Residents of the city with a transponder will have free access to the bridge for the next five years.
The bridges will not have toll people on location to collect tolls. Instead, scanners will be placed on and around the bridge and bills will be sent to person the vehicle is registered with.
The Veteran's Bridge is currently the only free-to-cross bridge into the city, as the Lafayette is down for construction until 2027.
Bay City Mayor-Elect Christopher Girard told WCMU that the privatization of the bridges was unavoidable due to the cost of the repairs necessary to keep the bridges running.
"I understand completely the frustration. However, the reality is that federal and state and county partners decided to leave it to the city to figure out what should happen with those bridges," Girard explained. "And unfortunately, the city being the low man on the totem pole, did not have the resources. And they weren't misappropriated or spent elsewhere, just the reality of the bridges."
The $5.50 fee can be cut down to just $2 for non-residents, however, with the acquisition of a transponder sticker for their vehicles. The stickers are free to obtain, and will work on any toll bridge or road across the United States.
The reasoning for the lowered toll with a transponder is due to a lower billing charge to the Bay City Bridge Partners, the group who maintains the bridges. The group pays less to send out bills to those with transponders than those without.
"They looked at all the different ways to do this outside of tolling and it just came back to the fact that without on a higher level county, state, or federal level to come in to help make this happen, it just it just wasn't going to happen with the city alone," Girard said. "And so generally people aren't necessarily happy. There's a lot of people that do understand."
Girard said that the way we pay for infrastructure is changing, and people should expect to see tolls begin to pop up in more places in the future.
"Infrastructure and how we pay for it is changing, and it will change as we continue to adapt different ways like electric vehicles. We now currently generate tax revenue through gas taxes to pay for most of our infrastructure, well, electric vehicles don't pay gas taxes," Girard said. "Guess what happens then. You have less money coming in to pay for the needed infrastructure. And truthfully, a fair way to pay for things is user based fees."
The Bay City Bridge Partners did not respond to our request to comment.
