According to rbowman <bowman@montana.com>:

Quite a few toll roads have adopted rfid devices so you don't even have to >stop to pay even for commercial trucks. Great system until the lights go >out. i don't know what they do. Maybe for short term events they just eat >the tolls rather than creating a huge snarl. The toll roads are mostly
back east and high volume so it would be a real mess.

Most of the toll roads I know have removed the toll booths and switched to overhead gantries. If you have a transponder, it bills your account, if not it reads your license plate and either bills your account if you've added your plate to it, or they mail you a bill. If the power goes out you travel for free since the gantries are just over the road, no gates or traffic lights.

Fun fact: Vermont has no toll roads, so they don't provide license plate info and I guess Vermonters can travel for free. The savings from getting rid of the toll booths must be enormous so even if a few people don't pay, they're still way ahead.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-ZPass

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On 2025-05-06, John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

Most of the toll roads I know have removed the toll booths and switched
to overhead gantries. If you have a transponder, it bills your account,
if not it reads your license plate and either bills your account if you've added your plate to it, or they mail you a bill. If the power goes out you travel for free since the gantries are just over the road, no gates or traffic lights.

We had this in a couple of places where new bridges had been built.
Some people would go far out of their way to get to one of the older
non-tolled bridges, wastimg time and causing bottlenecks. Then the NDP
(a left-wing party) got in and dismantled the automatic tolling systems.
Too bad - it would have been fairer if they had just put a $1.00 toll
on all crossings, rather than $3.25 on the new ones and nothing on the
others. But this is the zany world of B.C. politics, where alternating
parties battle with each other over whether an existing tunnel should
be replaced by a bridge or another tunnel, and million-dollar studies
are thrown away with each regime change.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

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Reply-To: slp53@pacbell.net

rbowman <bowman@montana.com> writes:

On Tue, 06 May 2025 18:38:54 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

We had this in a couple of places where new bridges had been built. Some
people would go far out of their way to get to one of the older
non-tolled bridges, wastimg time and causing bottlenecks. Then the NDP
(a left-wing party) got in and dismantled the automatic tolling systems.
Too bad - it would have been fairer if they had just put a $1.00 toll on
all crossings, rather than $3.25 on the new ones and nothing on the
others. But this is the zany world of B.C. politics, where alternating
parties battle with each other over whether an existing tunnel should be
replaced by a bridge or another tunnel, and million-dollar studies are
thrown away with each regime change.

My info is way out of date but at one time the bridges and tunnels around >NYC had tolls going in but not coming out, or maybe the other way around. >That made more sense than manning booths in both directions.

The bay area bridges are all one-way tolls.

I-80 Bay Bridge toll is paid westbound (inbound SF),
GG Bridge is paid southbound (inbound SF)
I-580 is paid westbound (towards San Quentin/Marin).
I-80 Carquinez is paid eastbound (outbound bay area)
I-680 Benicia is paid northbound (outbound bay area)
CA92, CA84 (San Mateo, Dumbarton) are both paid westbound (inbound silicon valley).


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According to rbowman <bowman@montana.com>:

My info is way out of date but at one time the bridges and tunnels around >NYC had tolls going in but not coming out, or maybe the other way around. >That made more sense than manning booths in both directions.

The tolls still are one-way, but the booths are all gone, pay
with E-ZPass or license plate.

https://www.panynj.gov/bridges-tunnels/en/index.html https://www.mta.info/fares-tolls/tolls

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Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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