tech

to costs. People manning toll booths are government employees. It requires about 5 people to support a single toll both over a typical 24/7 period. These employees earn pay, benefits, retirement and medical with their employment. Cash handling adds even more people and costs, then there is the fixed costs of heat, lights and cooling for the booth. Now, add maintenance for the facility and you begin to see some of the overhead of putting someone in a toll booth to tell you what you are to pay and make change.

EZPass and others charge a portion of the toll to handle the money reducing the government's needs to clerical help to verify the transactions. Billing sent because a vehicle didn't have a tag requires another small group to review the photos and prepare the bill.

EZPasses are not employees and do not need medical, retirement and vacations so therefore, the government saves the citizen the monies that would go for those things, the biggest of which is retirements.

Actually without more information about cost of tolling it will be rather hard to simply compare those two things. Obviously there will be no need to hire people to man booth, but on the other side there will be need for proper technicians to maintain whole system. And they are usually more costly than booth clerk.

Form practical point automating things makes costs less obvious. You can't see people behind whole system, that make it work, maintain and fix it. It gives government way to "reduce" costs of program, at least on paper. But if all hidden costs are accounted for it not necessary has to be cheaper.

Costs are main reason why "hiring" robots for industry work is still very limited. It's because cost of robots itself and their maintenance is often prohibitively high. Unless you have product that require high level of precision and can be sold at high enough price hiring people is still cheaper.

to me transponders make sense, there is accountability.

But cashless where the pic is taken of the plate, does not. The rental car scenario is one situation where people get ripped off--City of San Francisco stepped up and sued Hertz as a huge number of tourists using the Golden Gate got slammed.

There is some large % of tolls that go uncollected, so they create huge violations to cover them, meaning, if we suspend registrations or threaten to do so, if 10% of violations are paid with fines, we can let the other 90% go.

I don't remember the exact figures of unpaid tolls say in NYS, but it's staggering. So they went from a scenario where most tolls were paid, to a large portion not, and let's fine the **** out of everybody.

Seems like the compliance rate would be higher if registrations are going to be suspended/not renewed. Perhaps not immediately but down the road when the person needs to renew their registration, they're going to pony up. Of course with the availability of mass transit in NY, most people don't HAVE to have a car.

If they made these fines more reasonable, the percentage of folks who paid the violations would almost certainly go up. When you pi$$ people off with exorbitant fees, there's a tendency for them to do whatever they can to avoid paying them, just on principle.

Some good points made here by all but it seems to me that centralizing the toll mechanisms to a certain extent like EZ-Pass does, would go a long way toward reducing costs. I'm pretty certain that the relatively small group of highly-paid technical/IT/engineering personnel needed would still be cheaper than paying all of the personnel to man all of the toll booths all over the country with all of the benefits and overhead that go with them.

- Phil

I think the cashless tolling was not thought through. I hate to use amazon as an example, but until recently, everything they have done was well thought through, nothing uncovered.

Endless and countless examples of mess ups with the tolling.

A woman sped through E-ZPass toll booths, and her account was suspended. OK, procedure is do not use tags until suspension lifted.

So she goes through the same $1 toll which is now cashless, no transponder, but since her plate is linked to an E-ZPass account, violation, for each and every crossing.

Literally, she did nothing wrong, she removed the transponders, and is left with no other way to pay as there are no more booths, just the gantries. Can you imagine in the State of New York, nobody was bright enough to have envisioned this scenario? So once again, $1 toll, $50 fine, times 2, times 20 per month, to go to work. Let's see, $102/day to cross the bridge, when it should be $2. If the NYS Thruway authority were an online eTailer, they'd be out of business. But they're not, they are backed by a slogan, "Excelsior!"

Wow.

Sad thing is, this obvious screw-up on the part of the NYS TA is probably seen as a potential revenue opportunity. Since they didn't envision the scenario (or perhaps they did???), the poor lady will likely have to spend countless hours jumping through fiery hoops to try and get this straightened out, or pay an attorney LOT$ of money to do it for her if she hasn't already.

Some people might just pay the fine to be done with it, but that just rewards the incompetence, and makes it more likely that other similar scenarios will be "overlooked" in the future.

- Phil

It will be interesting to see if I get something in the mail from two bridge tolls south of Niagara on I-190 or 290???. I do not have a toll reader nor a cellphone which you are supposed to call them and let them know you were there.

I've never gotten a toll from a plate reader, but I haven't turned off the electronic system on the rental when I traveled in areas that actually have the things. Do they work?

A few years ago I rented a large van to take the entire family on a cruise after I retired. I had my GPS set to avoid toll roads, but due to the commotion in the van due to five granddads being extremely exited, I missed a turn. Unfortunately, the last one before a toll road. I went through one toll booth before being able to get off of the toll road. Three months later, I get a bill from Hertz letting me know that I had went through a toll booth and I was responsible for the $1.25 toll plus $12.95 for the Hertz service fee. Let's just say that I pay more attention now.
(Oh, by the way: the van didn't have a transponder so they got the plate and ran it through the BMV.)

Sounds like RLC money system to grab your cash