On the Disappearance of Toll Booths (and Cash)

I recently returned from my annual driving trip to Florida, which is increasingly almost the only occasion in the year when I am able to get beyond a 100 mile or so radius around my house. The most striking part of this year's trip was how many long familiar toll booths have been removed and replaced with eerie banks of cameras. I had come across these occasionally before, of course, but only one or two on a trip. This time I will probably have $40 or $50 worth of toll bills coming in the mail over the next few weeks which I would just as soon have paid for out of the beautiful billfold of cash I had brought along with me for the purpose, and which I ended up paying out for sodas and pretzels at Wawa and other lesser gas stations along the way instead...


Before expanding upon the toll theme I want to digress onto the subject of carrying around paper money, which even in this modern age I have tried to do as much as possible, though in recent years many circumstances have chipped away at my adherence to this position also. I am fond of reminiscing about my routine in college, when I did not even have an ATM card or any other credit card, but would go to the bank every Friday afternoon and withdraw $25 for the weekend, with no hope of getting any additional funds until Monday. While most weeks this money was depleted by Saturday night, as I ate lunch and dinner in the dining hall on Sunday and in those days always maintained enough of a stash of alcohol so that I was never in danger of having to go a night without it, it was very rare that I encountered any inconvenience from not being able to buy anything on Sunday. Up until recently I have always regularly carried some cash, though many years ago I gave up using it for bigger purchases such as gas and, as my family grew larger, the grocery store. Unfortunately in November the branch of the bank, and its accompanying ATM machine, that was located around the corner from my house closed, and the nearest machine where I can withdraw money now without paying fees is 6 miles away. The consequence of this has been that, somewhat against my will, I don't have cash on me as frequently as I used to, though I still need some from time to time, as my children often need snack money or $4 for a field trip or other such small sums which it is irritating to have to write a check or pull out a bank card for every time. But as with the smart phone, which I could tell was evil and held out against getting until 2015, circumstances seem to be moving in a direction where trying to have paper money about one at all times, at least for the harried person with children and too many things to do in the course of a day, is going to get increasingly impractical and inconvenient.


Anyway, this business about the tolls I am finding more and more disturbing the more I reflect upon it. The awareness of how constantly you are being tracked alone is enough to sap you of your will to go on living. In New Hampshire, where I live, there are 4 toll areas in the state, though I only ever encounter two of them, they cost $1 (there was much gnashing of teeth when this rate was raised from 75 cents about 10 years ago), and for the moment at least they all still have a couple of booths at the far end manned by actual human beings to collect cash. Neighboring Maine still has human toll collectors on their turnpike as well, and as these are the toll roads which I mainly frequent at this point in my life, I have been oblivious to what has been going on elsewhere. Massachusetts, perhaps prodded by a notorious scandal earlier in this decade where an unscrupulous toll worker had managed to scam enough overtime that he brought home $70,000 (or perhaps it was $90,000) in a single year, seems to have eliminated all of its former toll booths both in Boston, where it does have obvious benefits from a traffic standpoint, and along the turnpike. New York City doesn't have toll booths for at least the Triborough and Verrazano Narrows bridges anymore either, though upstate (I came home by a different route) the New York Thruway is still running on the pay-by-the-distance-travelled system and still has a toll-taker, and I was most delighted to encounter the toll booths still running on the Hamilton Fish Bridge on I-84, though who knows for how long (as an aside, in the area of 19th century New York politicians, I've never able to keep straight Hamilton Fish from Rufus King. And then you can also throw in William Rufus Devane King, though he was not actually from New York). (ed--and then perhaps the Bridge is really named after Hamilton Fish II, Hamilton Fish III, or Hamilton Fish IV, all of whom served in Congress representing New York. There is also a Hamilton Fish V, but he is still alive and works in publishing. It appears that he only has 2 daughters).


New Jersey, both on the turnpike and on the Garden State Parkway, which I took on the way home, have stuck with the old toll booth ways, though the Turnpike, which used to be about $3 from New York to Philadelphia, is more like $10 now. The bridge over the Delaware River connecting the New Jersey Turnpike with the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which was previously always included in the price of the latter, is now a separate toll--for how much I don't know, since the once somewhat dignified entry into my home state is now marked by the sinister flashing of a bank of cameras, and I haven't received that particular bill in the mail yet. The PA turnpike you can still pay for with cash. Ever since I started at St John's almost 30 years ago I have almost always made the trip from Philadelphia by getting off of I-95 in Delaware and taking US 301 down through the eastern shore of Maryland to the Bay Bridge, which is an uncrowded and pleasant way to get there, as that particular road and the farmland through which it mostly passes is old-fashioned and looks as if unchanged since the 1950s at least. There had never been a toll on it in all of these years until the state of Delaware, through which it runs for about 10 miles, decided apparently in the past year to divert the old road onto a newly built section entered through an arch of flashing cameras and charging $4 for the privilege. What a greedy little state they are! The one consolation was that once you get into Maryland the road again is the same sleepy old road it has always been. For now. The Bay Bridge still has a toll booth too, for the record.


In the course of writing about these roads I remembered a by today's standards quite bad thing I did when I was younger that I had completely forgotten about for more than 20 years, and that would be, if not impossible, difficult to pull off today unless you were very aware of where all these cameras were, though even in that case there are other ways to track you, GPS records or what have you. When I was in college, this would be around 1993 or '94, whenever there was a holiday or vacation during the school year, as I didn't care to go home for more than a couple days I would often arrange to squat in the house or apartment of people I knew during some part of the break. As I would often be alone and did not require a great deal of maintenance in those days, food and drink for one person who slept 12 hours a day being cheap enough, I enjoyed these occasions, read any number of books in a leisurely manner, went out in the evenings and in general led the kind of life I would have least indulged in more of if it had been the gods' pleasure to make me born to wealth. Over one Christmas holiday while staying in such a situation, I quite by accident stumbled upon the car keys that one of the regular inmates of the house, who lived somewhere too far to drive to and had flown home, had left behind, and, somewhat uncharacteristically for me, the temptation was too great to resist and I took the car on a little overnight trip which involved paying many tolls and driving into and parking in a major city which was a more hazardous undertaking at that time than it would be now. However I made it back and I must have even gotten the car back in the same parking spot, or one close enough to it, because the owner, who was not a particular friend of mine (I was more friendly with one of the other residents of the house) does not seem to have ever had any suspicion of my journey.


As I noted above, in the time elapsed while this post was written, a couple of the bills have already come in, from Massachusetts and New York, and it appears that the process is not going to come off without a good deal of the chicanery that has been creeping, or perhaps re-asserting, itself into American life over the past couple of decades. The Massachusetts bill only includes my Turnpike toll on the way down, which was 90 cents. However they are also charging 60 cents for a completely bogus "invoice fee"--you are the ones who ripped out the toll booths and made these mailings necessary, I believe, though I suppose they will argue that I could have an E-Z Pass account set up, though as I do not drive on a toll road more than once or twice a month why should I have to do that? Oh, and there is a "Previous balance" of $22.40, what for is not explained. I will note here that I have paid every toll by mail bill I have gotten in good faith (though not the invoice fees), if not always on time, so either they are cashing my checks and failing to record this in their books, or there is some kind of accrual of 'late fees' or some such nonsense that exist because it is no longer possible to pay on the spot and I have to send out a check for 90 cents (sorry, paying online involves filling out too many personal questions). In short, I won't be paying the previous balance. The New York bill is actually slightly less offensive, though they are claiming that I have an overdue balance of $8.50, which I either never received an invoice for or I have paid and they have neglected to note this in their system. I did rack up $26.75 worth of actual tolls there, headed by a whopping $17 for the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which I took because the George Washington Bridge was, as usual, backed up, even though it was around midnight when I passed through. When you throw in the $8.50 for the Triborough Bridge, it was an expensive detour. On the other hand, this is the extent of my experience of New York City for about five years past now, so I have to take what I can get. The radio stations are still free when you get close enough to town, at least.