A long farewell to area tollbooths
It’ll take years, but 7 bridges will see removal, redesign
The nearly two-decade slog toward electronic toll collection at the Bay Bridge and the Bay Area’s six other state-owned spans abruptly stopped with the arrival of the pandemic and the removal of human toll collectors grabbing bills and coins from drivers without FasTrak.
Now, with the cash and the humans gone for good — and no stopping necessary — the agency that runs the Bay Area’s toll bridges is working on a plan to do away with the booths and plazas where frustrated commuters have spent countless hours sitting in traffic.
Next year, the Bay Area Toll Authority, which operates the seven toll bridges owned by Caltrans, plans to start ripping out tollbooths and narrowing the multi-lane plazas where cars idle, waiting to pay tolls.
Instead, they’ll move to what’s known as open-road tolling, an obstacle-free way to collect tolls at highway speeds — not unlike the way freeway express lanes operate. Each bridge will get a gantry, a steel span above the highway, that collects tolls electronically from prepaid FasTrak accounts or photographs passing cars that will be mailed invoices.
The demise of the tollbooths, initially approved in 2018, is expected to start late next year, but it will take until at least 2026 to complete the work on all seven state-owned bridges — with the busy Bay Bridge coming last. The conversion at the seven spans will cost about $77 million, said John Goodwin, a spokesperson for the toll authority.
The Golden Gate Bridge, owned and operated by an independent district, has plans to add a new overhead toll collection gantry — after a public online survey in 2018 — but won’t get rid of its Art Deco tollbooths, which share the famed look and color of the landmark span and were installed in the 1980s.
At the state-owned bridges, however, things could look a lot different.
With no need for a long line of tollbooths, the multiple lanes that serve as an asphalt holding pen for cars waiting to pay their tolls will shrink to more closely approximate the number of traffic lanes crossing the bridge, or, at the Carquinez, where the booths come after the bridge, the number of highway lanes.
Planners at the toll authority are analyzing traffic counts, considering the number of lanes flowing in and out of each plaza, working with a consultant and negotiating with Caltrans. As is often the case, the Bay Bridge will pose the biggest challenge.
“Everything is harder at the Bay Bridge,” Goodwin said. “It’s far more complex than any other bridge.”
While many car commuters have longed for the demise of tollbooths, figuring it would hasten their commutes, the main reasons for ripping them out are to improve safety by eliminating obstacles in the middle of the roadway and reducing the number of merges drivers have to navigate, said Jeff Gerbracht, the project manager for the Bay Area Toll Authority.
“When tollbooths are gone, it’s a totally different dynamic,” he said.
Ridding the bridges of tollbooths should also speed traffic, bridge officials said, but mostly outside of the busiest times and on bridges that see less traffic.
“At most of the bridges most of the time, open-road tolling will eliminate that need to slow down to 25 (mph) to squeeze past the tollbooths,” Goodwin said. “That will improve sped and throughput and reduce tailpipe emissions, but there are times, like at Bay Bridge in the morning commute, where that advantage may not be so evident. The advantage may be more evident at 7 a.m. on a Sunday than at 7 a.m. on a Monday.”
The problem, particularly at the Bay Bridge, is controlling traffic flow — and congestion. The bridge is by far the Bay Area’s busiest, and one of the most traversed in the nation. A dozen lanes of traffic from three freeways flow into the bridge’s 18-lane waiting area with two more bypass lanes, pass through the tollbooths and 16 lanes of metering lights, then eventually funnel into five lanes across the bridge into San Francisco.
Reducing the number of lanes at the Bay Bridge toll plaza will take at least a year to figure out, Gerbracht said, and planners are just getting started.
“We just don’t know what the plan will be,” he said, “but we do know that if we don’t have enough storage (at the toll plaza), traffic would back up through the interchanges and maybe even to the Caldecott Tunnel.”
The Richmond-San Rafael Bridge also presents challenges, he said, since the span has just two westbound lanes of traffic and a toll plaza squeezed between a steep hill and Chevron’s Richmond refinery — a combination that prevents expansion and guarantees a backup when traffic is heavy.
Meanwhile, in the southern reaches of the bay, both the Dumbarton and San Mateo bridges have metering lights installed, Gerbracht said, but they’ve never been used. Caltrans, he said, wants to switch on the lights.
Because Caltrans owns the bridges, the toll authority needs its approval for any changes at the seven bridges, said Bart Ney, a Caltrans spokesperson. He said the agencies are working together to review designs and win required environmental approvals.
The Benicia-Martinez Bridge on Interstate 680 already has open-road tolling — with three lanes unencumbered by tollbooths on the left side of the plaza and nine with tollbooths on the right side. When the new northbound span of the bridge opened in 2007, the toll authority decided to test open-road tolling, which officials then called “the wave of the future.”
Now the future is arriving on all of the Bay Area’s bridges.
The Bay Area move is in keeping with a national trend toward eliminating tollbooths, collectors and cash tolls, said Pat Jones, executive director and CEO of the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association, a tolling industry group. About six of every 10 bridges, tunnels and highways that collect tolls have gone cashless nationwide, according to the association’s database, and since 2010, 97% of all new toll operations have been electronic.
“Overall, the trend towards all-electronic tolling started before the pandemic,” he said, “but the pandemic certainly accelerated it.”