Golden Gate Bridge To Eliminate Tollbooths

Hugh Pickens writes writes "The San Francisco Chronicle reports that tollbooths and toll collectors, a fixture at the Golden Gate Bridge since it opened in 1937, will be eliminated starting in 2012 as the bridge moves to an all-electronic system, cutting 34 jobs and saving $19.2 million over the first eight years. The bridge will move to a toll collection strategy that combines the existing FasTrak system with one that photographs the license plates of cars going through the toll plaza and mails a bill to the registered owners. Other structures and bridges have successfully gone to all-electronic tolls, including the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia and the Leeville Bridge in Louisiana, but not everyone is happy with the change. 'This is a world-famous bridge, and you need a human face,' says Philip Hynes. 'You need people in those toll booths to greet people.'"

Comments

When will they and the other us systems go ezpass?

[Joe The Dragon]

When will they and all the other us systems link up with ez-pass?

Clean air anyone? Traffic jams?

[name_already_taken]

Further, what these idiots fail to realize is that all those cars idling at and then accelerating away from the tollbooths add up to a huge emissions source - something which California says they're always concerned about.

In the last decade they added "Open-road tolling" on the tollways around Chicago - the air quality was measurably improved in the areas near the toll-collection sites.

The bridges in the bay area are also major commuter routes - eliminating the requirement for every car to stop at a toll booth can only improve traffic flow.

For everyone who loves the toll collectors, I bet there are hundreds who hate them. I remember a story in one of the Chicago papers about all the bad things people would do to the toll collectors - like heating up coins using the car's cigarette lighter before giving them to the collector. The exhaust gasses those folks have to breathe all day can't be good for them either.

Just get rid of tolls completely.

[Zaphod-AVA]

Tolls waste a lot of time and money in an attempt to spread the cost of the road to the people that 'use' it, but this doesn't work. Everyone benefits from the road system. Even if you don't own a car, the goods and services you use rely on them. Adding tolls just increases the cost of those goods and services, so the entire toll industry is a waste of time. Just tax people evenly for the roads we all rely on and skip the wasteful toll booths and electronics.

Tourists vs residents

[FooAtWFU]

It's a question of tourists versus residents, one of the long-standing San Francisco tug-of-wars that's only been escalating of late since the city's budget fell apart. San Francisco is very much a place of "soak the tourists for all they're worth". A one-way cable-car ride is $5. (Residents can get a monthly transit pass that lets them ride at no additional cost.) In Golden Gate Park, they just fenced in the Conservatory of Flowers last year so they could start charging money to people without a driver's license which says they live in the city... i.e. soak the tourists. There's complaints that the planned streetcar/subway expansion for the T-Third light rail line is all for the tourists.

Take a look at Locans and Tourists #3: San Francisco, a map of geotagged photos of San Francisco based on a 'tourist' vs 'resident' heuristic (tourists take photos all at once; residents take them over a period of months). San Francisco is a divided city.