Pennsylvania Turnpike to build new interchange at Route 981 in Westmoreland County

After years of talking about it, the Pennsylvania Turnpike and State Route 981 are finally going to be merged.  

In a press release sent out on Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission announced that it was adding an interchange project to its 2026-27 capital plan.

The project would put a new diamond interchange in Mount Pleasant Township, connecting the turnpike and Route 981 and increasing, it says, both connectivity and economic development opportunities in the area.

"We've talked about building this interchange in the Mount Pleasant area for decades and I think what really made this a possibility was our transition to open road tolling," said Marissa Orbanek, the press secretary for the Pennsylvania Turnpike. "With open road tolling, which launches systemwide in January, we can add new interchanges a lot more quickly and a lot more cost-effectively."

This new interchange, along with the Lafayette and Ridge interchange in Montgomery County on the eastern side of the state, will be the first official on-and-off interchanges built by the turnpike with its new open road tolling system.

The cost of the Mount Pleasant project will be around $45 million.

But while this project is getting the green light, there is another interchange project in Westmoreland that is on hold.

"The State Route 130 interchange is something that is still happening, but right now it is paused," said Orbanek. "We did a traffic analysis and through that traffic analysis, what we learned is that there are some significant traffic mitigation needs that need to happen and that really requires a lot more extensive planning, resources and costs. So, we still need some time to figure that out. It is going to be a lot longer of a time frame than we had expected, just to make sure that that corridor and that area can carry and efficiently handle the traffic from that interchange."

There is no set date for when construction will start in Mount Pleasant, but the Turnpike Commission says the preliminary design phase is already underway.