For Whom the Road Tolls

Because we raised our kids in Colorado, vacations to visit our extended families were often by airplane, since my relatives were in California and my wife’s were in Florida. It was the rare trip where we could see any of them by taking the car. So when my wife and I drove from South Carolina to Pennsylvania recently to visit my brother and his wife, we were reminded of what makes travel by car different than by plane. Toll roads, for instance.

Take your pick of payment

I have memories of toll roads my kids will never have. They’re old enough to remember passing through the booths and handing coins or bills to the collector. But they won’t remember the unmanned alternative, which was to toss exact change into a big plastic basket, listen to the coins process through the mechanics below, and hope/pray the gate to the toll road would raise. That automated approach seems almost quaint compared to today’s electronic alternatives.

I say alternatives (plural) because yes, that’s what we have with today’s toll roads. It confounds me. Why in heaven’s name haven’t we developed a painless, seamless, and most importantly, nationally coordinated approach to toll road payments? To some extent (nineteen states) we have a solution – E-ZPass, which by subscription and sticker allows convenient passage.  But even E-ZPass is not a perfect system.

Not so E-Z

For the rest of the country’s tolls – and for most of our round-trip drive between South Carolina and Pennsylvania – we have the clunky alternative. You pass through a now-unmanned (“un-personned?”) toll booth, where a camera grabs your license plate with a noticeable flash. Then, somewhere down the road (ha) a paper bill arrives in your mailbox. By my count I have four or five of these bills coming my way. It’s been ten days since we’ve returned home and I have yet to receive even one.

The cookie recipe is still on the back of the package

[Trivia detour:  Nestlé’s famous Toll House chocolate chip cookies aren’t named after toll booths but rather for an inn in Massachusetts where baker Ruth Wakefield came up with the recipe.  Wakefield and Nestlé struck a deal in the 1940s: her recipe printed on their bags in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate.  How very “Willy Wonka”, eh?]

Here is my unequivocally efficient approach to paying tolls across our many-highway’d nation. When you first get a driver’s license, you also sign up for a bank account-linked program which allows seamless paying of ALL tolls across the land – roads, bridges, tunnels, whatever – through a single readable sticker on your windshield. If you somehow don’t pay the tolls because of say, “insufficient funds”? Well sorry, your driver’s license doesn’t get renewed until you settle up at the DMV.

A $3 toll gets you through Baltimore’s Harbor Tunnel

My system is so logical it’s probably the reason I’ve never been pegged for a government job. In Colorado and elsewhere they almost have it right with the E-ZPass system – a sticker linked to a bank account. The problem is, they hold a minimum balance in a middleman (middle person?) account to guarantee payment of tolls.  I object, your honor. Why should Colorado have forty-odd dollars of my hard-earned money at all times when they can just settle up unpaid tolls whenever I renew my license?

Warning: cash-cow crossing

Then again, I have a beef with the tolls themselves, and that is, they pay for far more than the maintenance of the roads. You can’t tell me $10 per vehicle per crossing of the Golden Gate Bridge (GGB) is needed just to maintain the bridge. Here’s the jaw-dropping math for you.  112,000 cars cross the GGB every day.  That’s over forty million cars per year.  That puts the annual toll-taking at over four hundred million dollars.  $400M for bridge maintenance?  Sorry, fair traveler, you’re voluntarily lining the coffers of California (and San Francisco) every time you cross. “If I’m elected” (as we’ll hear countless times in the next two months), I’ll limit toll-taking to whatever it costs to maintain the bridge, road, or tunnel.  Not a dollar more.

On our return trip from Pennsylvania, I was amused to pass through one toll both with an actual human toll-taker. Those cordial people are still out there, collecting cash one car at a time. The woman in our instance happily returned us $19.25 on a $20.00 bill (and who’s happy to do that anymore?).

Time to bake cookies!

I was also amused… no, “gratified” is the better word; to pull into the parking lot of a South Carolina “rest area” shortly before we got home, for the use of a perfectly safe, clean, toll-free restroom on a toll-free highway. Maybe rest areas and their restrooms are the reason tolls cost more than the maintenance of the roads? Probably not. That would equate to a logical explanation for a government expenditure, which is an oxymoron.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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Author: Dave

Five hundred posts would suggest I have something to say… This blog was born from a desire to elevate the English language, highlighting eloquent words from days gone by. The stories I share are snippets of life itself, and each comes with a bonus: a dusted-off word I hope you’ll go on to use more often. Read “Deutschland-ish Improvements” to learn about my backyard European wish list. Try “Slush Fun” for the throwback years of the 7-Eleven convenience store. Or drink in "Iced Coffee" to discover the plight of the rural French cafe. On the lighter side, read "Late Night Racquet Sports" for my adventures with our latest moth invasion. As Walt Whitman said, “That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Here then, my verse. Welcome to Life In A Word.

22 thoughts on “For Whom the Road Tolls”

  1. The secret, it seems to me, is to live far away from a coast. Tolls are quite uncommon here, particularly if you can avoid the Chicago area.

    The only hole I can find in your plan is that once everyone’s driver’s license is a guarantee of toll payments, tolls will start popping up everywhere due to ease of collection.

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    1. I have no issue with tolls as long as they’re priced to maintain whatever they’re associated with, and nothing more. Also, there always needs to be a no-tolls alternative, no matter how inconvenient, so the paying of tolls is technically voluntary. I did spend a lot of pocket change between Chicago and South Bend on the Indiana Toll Road in the 1980s. I’m guessing my route to Notre Dame would’ve been pretty darned adventurous without it.

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  2. When I go to the suburbs, it’s hard to keep track of how many tolls I pay for, really. It’s not until I get a notification that my funds are low, do I go and check. I hate trusting their system, but it’s how it’s set up. Interesting about the Toll House chocolate chip cookies.

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    1. I meant to include the point you’re making about subscriptions in your comment. When the payment process is so convenient (like credit cards), we’re more likely to pay without much attention to the actual cost. It’s a sense of comfort in the moment, followed up by the jaw-dropping HOW much did I pay? when we get the bill. Seems like our federal government would find a national subscription approach even more appealing for that reason.

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  3. Wow. So, they mail you your bill, and what’s the consequence of people not paying? What about if people simply remove their license plates before a long trip? I hate that I’m thinking like a criminal mind, but, seriously. Maybe they don’t care all that much b/c the fees they collect more than make up for the occasional ne’er-do-well. The GGB seriously should lower their cost. Think about all the commuters for work! I imagine they get some bulk use pass. Thanks for doing the math. That’s ridiculous.

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    1. I did the GGB math three times to be sure I wasn’t wrong. I still can’t believe the number. That’s a single bridge, out of dozens in your state alone. Maybe we need to start our own country and make a ton of money! I’m still waiting on my paper bills, from a trip that took place over two weeks ago. And removing the license plates? I wouldn’t have thought of that, Betsy, because I’m a follow-the-rules driver. Er, until I got that speeding ticket…

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      1. I don’t know that I would have thought of the license plate thing. I’ve heard of people removing their front plate because technically, only the back one is legally required. Those people would do well on toll roads.

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      2. Y’know Betsy, it didn’t occur to me until this comment, but since I don’t have a front license plate those cameras must be snapping my back one, right? I’ll be watching my mailbox for those bills 🙂

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      6. CA may be more unique than you think in this regard. You can’t even “buy” two plates down here. One is the standard. Makes sense the one should go on the back, but it does beg the question of what do do up front. College logo? Tacky saying? Anything I come up with compromises the look of my car so I just with an empty frame like most other South Carolina cars I see 🙂

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  4. I have not encountered a toll booth since my last time visiting Canada and that was not only paying your toll fee, but also a Customs employee who asked to see your driver’s license and birth certificate and declare any good purchased. Now, since the Patriot Act, you need a passport to cross into Canada and likewise to return to the U.S. at any entry point. I like your idea Dave – that makes sense as it’s a surefire way to collect revenue. I’d worry about an unmanned toll booth taking my license plate number and no bill arriving in the mail and what action might be taken against you. I had no idea about the GGB tolls – crazy!

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    1. Agreed, Linda, those four or five bills are sitting unpaid in the back of my mind, even though each of them is only $5-$10. My brother suggested I register for the (free) frequent traveler programs for each toll road, and then I could search for and pay for my tolls online. I’d also pay less per toll. Great idea in theory, but I have no idea exactly where those toll roads were in my long journey to/from PA.

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      1. I agree with your brother Dave – not to be paranoid but I wouldn’t want it to come back and haunt you. So you can search for tolls in both states, or I’ll bet the state police for PA and SC could tell you. Forty days is a long time to wait for an invoice – they should come up with a more efficient way to do this.

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  5. In the SF Bay Area, where I sometimes travel, they have this electronic transponder called FasTrack that you use for bridge tolls and road tolls. It’s 1990s tech and to get one you have to create and account a put down a deposit. With COVID, they installed license plate readers on all the bridges and laid off all the toll collectors, so now you have one of two ways to pay the toll. If you don’t have FasTrack, they send you a bill, which is odd to get a bill for a California bridge while I live in Nevada.

    But then last year, just when I have received a bunch of bills for crossing their bridges, I also got a letter say that there was a lawsuit and they were sending me a refund for all the tolls they charged me in 2022, so basically I haven’t paid a bridge for any of my trips in 2022 or 2023.

    so they don’t have that 400 million — they had to send it all back for reasons I don’t understand. In a good year, they spend maybe have on repairs and the other half in court fighting off the most recent wacky lawyer induced lawsuit.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Lawsuits – ugh. Our HOA dues are funding one as well. Now you have me wondering if I’ll ever see my paper toll bills. I may try to hunt them down online just to get them off my conscience. Colorado’s toll road around Denver went through a similar transformation as FasTrack but it had more to do with tech than COVID. It seemed no sooner had they completed the booths (and the road) when they shut them down in favor of windshield stickers. Those booths are still out there; skeletons of a time gone by.

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  6. From 2001 to 2011 I commuted 18 miles on the Florida Turnpike to the school where I taught. The cost: $9.00 per week, even though the road was built in the 1950s. So much for “As soon as the road is paid for, we’ll suspend tolls.” (FL made $991 million from Turnpike tolls in 2018– https://www.wftv.com/news/9-investigates/why-do-we-still-pay-tolls-even-after-the-roads-are-paid-for-/919676010/.) They claim it’s necessary for maintenance and building new roads–new toll roads, no doubt. (FL has more toll roads than any other state.) Tolls instead of state income tax, perhaps.

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    1. It’s a head-scratcher when only 20% of the collected tolls (per the article) are needed to maintain the road. Four out of five cents goes to debt service and other needs? You’d hope the state budget for roads would be a little more helpful than that. This reminds me of the hot topic in Colorado right now (and likely many states) where the government is “fee-ing” residents to death as a workaround to raising taxes. Bit of a bait/switch versus making a better effort to balance the budget.

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