The Toll Road Bandito

Times have changed. With automated tolling beginning today on the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, drivers now have to pay to cross Lake Washington on SR 520 unless they ignore the bill for the trip when it arrives in the mail (a bad long-term strategy) or make a late-night crossing. They can also go out of their way to cross the lake on the still untolled I-90 bridge or take an alternate route around it. None of these options would have been acceptable to a guy I knew years ago—the Toll Road Bandito.

Fresh out of college in early 1974, I shared a rented townhouse in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with a couple of friends my age. We all had decent but not high-paying jobs in the city of Norfolk.

At the time the fastest way to get to and from work was to take the Virginia Beach-Norfolk Expressway, a toll road that cost $.25 each way. Tolls were collected at a central toll plaza which had a half-dozen or so exact-change lanes and several booths where you paid an attendant. In the exact-change lanes, you tossed a quarter into a hopper and then waited for a control arm to lift before driving through. The expressway had a few exits before the toll plaza. At those you paid 10 cents into an exact-change machine as you left the expressway. Payment was on the honor system as there were no control arms or attendants.

A 25-cent toll seems quaint today, but back then everyone I knew hated paying it. The worst part was that there was little recourse. The alternate route—Virginia Beach Boulevard—was a heavily commercialized four-lane highway. Each time you took it to avoid the toll, you would sit in traffic at its frequent and lengthy traffic signals vowing to never make that mistake again. Days, nights, or weekends didn’t matter. It was always a better use of your time to take the expressway.

One of my housemates drove the expressway every day but almost never paid the toll, thus earning the Toll Road Bandito moniker. His simple justification for not paying was that he believed all roads should be free. Plus he wanted to keep the money. To get a free trip he would tailgate the car in front of him in one of the exact-change lanes and then speed through before the control arm descended. A weak buzzer sounded to note the violation, but there were no high-tech cameras to record evidence of the crime. The only time he paid up was when a police car was parked at the toll plaza.

The traffic ticket for not paying the toll was around $17 if you were caught. At one point we calculated that he could get a citation every day for a week and still be in the black.

Much as I disliked the toll, I didn’t have the nerve to copy the TRB’s technique at the toll plaza. My biggest protest was to occasionally toss an IOU into the 10-cent machine at one of the tolled expressway exits.

Fast forward to 21st century all-electronic tolling with its windshield-mounted transponders, overhead tolling equipment, online accounts, variable pricing depending on the time of day, cameras that photograph your license plate, and a program that mails you a bill if you don’t have a registered account. There are no toll booths and no exact-change lanes. The only thing similar to the old Virginia Beach-Norfolk Expressway toll road is that drivers dislike the tolls just as much.

The new system is complicated and will have some glitches, but it’s probably a bad bet to think it won’t work when you are crossing the bridge. I wonder if the Toll Road Bandito could find a way to consistently beat it.