Traffic decreased about 1.25 percent, adding up to 7,000 fewer transactions, between Thursday and Monday, Greg Barr said. That’s a smaller holiday travel decline than the turnpike saw in recent years, when declines of between 2 percent and 3 percent were typical.
According to the toll collection numbers, the busiest day on the turnpike for the holiday weekend was Friday with 145,000 transactions. A total of 118,000 transactions happened on Thursday followed by 114,000 on Monday.
Barr said the budget for the Parkways Authority in the coming year reflects a projected overall 2-percent decline in turnpike traffic.
“Hopefully, we’ll do better, but it’s a conservative estimate. We’d much rather be surprised in a good way than in a bad way about what our budget is,” he said.
