Bay Area bridge toll takers gone for good
In-person pay won’t return even after pandemic eases
Larry Collins remembers getting the call as he drove home one night in March at the end of a 10-hour shift collecting tolls at the Carquinez Bridge. It was his supervisor telling him not to report to work the next day — with the state and country locking down to contain the coronavirus, officials were launching a temporary new toll system in which drivers who normally stopped to pay with cash would get a bill in the mail instead.
He didn’t realize it, but after 23 years Collins had just worked his last day as a toll collector.
For decades, quickly handing over your toll — of a few cents, then a few dollars, then a few more dollars — to a human being on the other side of an open booth window was a daily ritual for thousands of bridge- crossing Bay Area commuters. The arrival of Fastrak two decades ago meant fewer and fewer people have been stopping to pay their tolls in person, though it was still a usual sight to see drivers lined up to pay cash in the dwindling number of lanes where it was accepted.
Now, the Bay Area Toll Authority says, collectors at the region’s seven stateowned bridges who were pulled out of their booths in the early days of the pandemic won’t return even after the threat of COVID-19 recedes. Those spans join the Golden Gate Bridge, which eliminated in-person toll collection back in 2013, and mean toll takers are a thing of the past throughout the Bay Area.
“We knew it was just a matter of time,” Collins said. Fastrak, which debuted in 2000, “was the writing on the wall,” he said. “The pandemic just sped things up.”
The toll authority, which oversees the Bay Bridge, Dumbarton and other stateowned spans, last year adopted a plan to more gradually end in-person tolls over the next five years. Eventually, they planned to remove the booths where Collins and his colleagues worked, remaking the toll plazas into open-road operations where traffic can flow far more smoothly because drivers zip through and pay while barely slowing down, much less stopping.
But when the coronavirus hit this spring, making toll takers’ face-to-face interactions with hundreds or even thousands of people per day seem far too risky, the authority had to scramble to implement that new system practically overnight, BATA spokesman John Goodwin said.
Since March, drivers in the “cash” lanes have been told to continue past the booth without paying or even stopping. Instead a camera snaps a photo of their license plate and a customer service center sends them a bill for each crossing.
“It has worked OK, but not great,” Goodwin said.
The system got a break at first, as the lockdowns meant less than half as many cars were crossing the bridges compared to pre-pandemic traffic. But since then, many of those cars have returned — weekday traffic across the seven spans is just 20% below what it was last year. The Bay Bridge now typically sees more than 100,000 cars pass through its toll plaza each weekday, down just 15% compared to the volume before the pandemic.
While about three-quarters of drivers use Fastrak, which hasn’t been affected by the switch, that still leaves tens of thousands of toll notices that must be processed each day, which is taking longer because of the volume, Goodwin said. And customers who call with questions about their bills are facing longer waits.
“As traffic volume has increased that has put greater strain on the customer service center,” Goodwin said. “We’re showing the wear and tear there.”
It’s also costing the toll authority money: An October BATA report found 9% of bills for bridge crossings between March and August had not yet been paid despite drivers getting toll notices by mail, amounting to $26.5 million in outstanding revenue. Goodwin said that the authority expects to recover much of that money, since it can put holds on drivers’ registration renewals if they don’t pay up.
A new and permanent all- electronic system will go into place sometime next year. Rather than mailing out a notice for each unpaid crossing, it will send drivers a monthly statement for all of their tolls, reducing the amount of paperwork.
Meanwhile, drivers can use any lane, whether or not they have Fastrak, Goodwin said. But it will take at least until the spring for signs and lane markings to reflect that change.
The empty tollbooths will be sticking around for a while, though. The plan to renovate toll plazas is expected to take several more years for design and construction, but you can get a glimpse of what’s to come when you cross the BeniciaBridge going north — the Fastrak lanes there have been remade in the style of “open-road tolling,” with no booths or other physical barriers between them.
As for toll collectors like Collins, they have remained employed with Caltrans and take training courses meant to prepare them for new jobs within the department. About 250 people worked in toll collection at the Bay Area’s bridges, including supervisors and custodians.
Collins said he enjoyed his time in the toll collection booth, and having such little interaction during the pandemic, after a career spent meeting more than 1,000 people each day, was “a new way of living.” He has applied for a new job in Caltrans’ dispatch center, but at 64 he’s also thinking about retiring rather than taking on a new career.
Collins said he understands the move toward automation and efficiency. Still, he thinks losing the human touch will come with its own cost, like for the tourists to whom he’d often dispense directions. And then there was the man who drove up to Collins’ booth last year saying he was having a heart attack — Collins got his supervisor to call 911 while he shut down his lane and diverted cars around him, then watched as an ambulance took the man away.
Collins has also had a few famous customers in his 23 years, like NFL Hall-of-Fame 49ers Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott, and NBA legend Bill Russell. His favorites, though, were the ordinary customers who pulled into his booth in a bad mood, but left it smiling.
“You would be the first person they’d see in the morning,” Collins said. “A ‘good morning!’ goes a long way.”