SAN FRANCISCO — Cash tolls — and the long lines they create as people stop to pay them — may soon be a thing of the past in the Bay Area.
That could be good news for the 137 million toll-paying motorists who cross over Bay Area bridges every year and who find themselves in ever-lengthening commutes. Eliminating cash tolls, or even removing the toll plaza itself, could save up to 7 minutes, analysts said — though commuters say the actual time they spend sitting at the toll plaza is a whole lot longer.
“It can add an hour to your commute some days,” Oakland resident Kate Huckelbridge said of the Bay Bridge plaza. “That’s probably on the longer end, but it can.”
And, it’s getting worse, said Jen Cehn, of Oakland.
“In the last few years, especially, it’s gotten so bad,” she said. “Sometimes, it’ll take me an hour to get into the city. Without traffic, it’s 20 minutes.”
Replacing cash tolls with an all-electronic system, or possibly removing the plazas entirely, is one of the few ways to speed traffic in bridge corridors regularly doubling as parking lots during heavy commute hours, said Randy Rentschler, a spokesperson for the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA), which is in charge of collecting tolls on all Bay Area bridges except the Golden Gate Bridge.
Cash payers create long lines as motorists stop to fork over greenbacks, Retschler said. The evidence is on the Bay Bridge during weekends, when folks paying cash sit in lines even though there’s plenty of room in FasTrak lanes. And, at the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, for example, Rentschler said the cash lines routinely cause a backup, but because of the geography, there’s no more room to add another cash lane.
“If you can’t have any more cash-payer lanes, but you keep cash paying as an option, then it just makes the traffic that much worse,” he said. “So, we either have to go all-electronic, or we stay in the status we’re in.”
The Golden Gate Bridge switched to electronic tolling in 2013, with cameras that automatically snap photos of motorists’ license plates. Those with FasTrak accounts are debited, while those without accounts are sent a bill in the mail that they can pay online, over the phone or via USPS. Those who receive mailed bills are encouraged to get FasTrak accounts, Rentschler said.
“That’s ultimately what we want,” he said. More than 70 percent of drivers used FasTrak accounts to pay tolls in 2015, a figure the toll authority expects to rise to 80 percent by 2020, with or without all-electronic tolling.
People paying cash can also pay in person at a number of locations, which would be expanded if the authority switched to electronic tolling, said John Goodwin, a toll authority spokesman.
On Wednesday, the authority will consider two options: one that leaves plazas in place but allows motorists to pass through them without stopping, similar to the Golden Gate, and one that removes the plazas entirely and reduces the splintering of lanes leading to and from the plazas.
Both options save taxpayers a little money on an annual basis — but not much. Money saved from staffing toll booths would be spent tracking down toll violators and getting them to pay up, Rentschler said. The benefits, according to the Jacobs Engineering Group, which analyzed the pluses and minuses for the toll authority, are mostly in reducing traffic and the vehicle emissions that go along with it.
There also would no longer be any toll booth robberies — a relatively rare occurrence; there were 38 toll booth robberies between 2005 and 2017 — and there would be fewer collisions caused by people merging between lanes. It would also allow the toll authority to better manage traffic congestion, Jacobs said in the report.
But, there are challenges with the electronic approach, the engineering group said. Switching to electronic tolling would mean eliminating jobs for toll collectors. That’s not good for workers in an increasingly costly Bay Area, said Oakland resident Maggie Downey, who commutes across the Bay Bridge.
“We need an economy that works for everyone,” she said. “And those jobs just wouldn’t exist. So, what would happen to the workers?”
Under its collective bargaining agreement, Caltrans isn’t required to retrain toll collectors for new positions, Goodwin said, though, under the proposed plan, the toll authority would fund that training. The SEIU Local 1000, which represents toll collectors in the Bay Area, did not return requests for comment.
There would be more jobs added to a regional customer service center, operated by Conduent Inc., to process tolls, send notices to people without FasTrak accounts and answer customers’ questions. The company has an office in San Francisco, Goodwin said, as well as others throughout the country.
Of the two options, open-road tolling, which removes the toll plazas, would take the longest to get running and would use the highest up-front costs — $55 million compared to $23 million for all-electronic tolling. But, open-road tolling saves the agency an estimated $5 million annually over all-electronic tolling. And, it would speed up traffic the most.
Depending on feedback from the toll authority Wednesday, Goodwin said a proposal to go with one of the two options would be presented early next year. And, it’d take another two or three years for the system to be put in place: the spring of 2021 for all-electronic tolling or the summer of 2022 for open-road tolling.