Cars enrolled in the "Carpool Plan" (3 or more passengers) pay only $3.50 to cross the bridge. The GW Bridge charges tolls only in one direction, east, same as all the other Hudson River tolls. The GW Bridge takes in approximately $1 million in tolls each day.
Combined, all six bridges and tunnels of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey rake in about $1.2 billion per year.
The GW Bridge is the busiest vehicular bridge in the world. In December 2011 the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced plans to replace the vertical suspender cables for the first time since it was built 80 years ago. The cost is expected to well exceed one billion dollars, possibly two billion. The cost of determining exactly what repairs are needed was $4.5 million and took two years to complete.
592 vertical suspender ropes, each containing 283 wires, will be replaced. Each cable weighs between 1,500 and 10,000 pounds, depending on the length. Laid end-to-end, the cables would be 32 miles long. Each individual wire laid end to end would be 9,100 miles long, a little more than 1/3 the distance around the Earth's equator.
Replacing the suspension wire in stages will take eight years. Starting in 2013, the agency wants to clean up the massive anchorages tying down the bridge’s foundation, replace broken wires in the cables and replace the dehumidifiers in the chambers where the anchors are held. The project is expected to create at least 3,6000 jobs, not including the manufacturing of the cable itself.
As for where the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's toll money goes, here's a good rundown (
How does the Port Authority spend its money? | WABC-TV).
The above information was aggregated from the very interesting reads of
Wikipedia,
WNYC Radio, and
The New York Times.
