As a toll road In 1963, the Kentucky Turnpike Authority recommended what was then known as the "Central Kentucky Turnpike" be constructed from
Elizabethtown to the
Lexington-
Frankfort area. The parkway was opened in November 1965 as the Kentucky Bluegrass Parkway (the "Kentucky" was dropped a few years later) and was originally a
toll road, as were all Kentucky parkways. The parkway route largely parallels that of
U.S. Route 62. State law requires that toll collection ceases when enough tolls are collected to pay off the parkway's construction bonds which occurred in 1991.
Toll plazas and charges The table below shows the locations of the former toll plazas, and toll charges that were previously charged for consumer-sized, or class 1 vehicles.
Name changes In 2003, the road was renamed in honor of
Martha Layne Collins, the first female
governor of Kentucky. Previously, it was the Kentucky Bluegrass parkway (and signed as "KB Parkway"), then later renamed the "Blue Grass Parkway" (sometimes with "Bluegrass" as one word, though in the highway's name, it was officially two words), and often called the "BG Parkway" because of the abbreviation once used on its original signs from 1965 until they were replaced by a shield with the Collins name in 2003. ==Route description==