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

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.