By Mike DeNardo

Imagine driving from Maine to Florida without stopping to pay a toll. The people who run E-ZPass are a little closer to making that happen.

Your E-ZPass transponder will pay highway tolls from Maine to Illinois to Virginia. And E-ZPass could add North Carolina to its list by Labor Day, says P.J. Wilkins, executive director of the E-ZPass Interagency Group.

“The first step is to make sure that their equipment is compatible with ours and we haven’t done that testing yet. But we’re going to do that here shortly. And if it works out the way that we hope that it will, and they prove to be compatible, then it’s very likely that we could be interoperable with them by the end of the summer.”

Wilkins says the goal is to have E-ZPass accepted up and down the entire I-95 corridor. But he can’t put a timetable on that, saying they need to jump through some technical hoops because right now Florida’s equipment is not compatible with E-ZPass.