Illinois Tollway tears out last booths, ending age of paying with change

Gone are the days of stashing coins in your car for highway toll booths, the last vestige of a 60-year period when drivers could stop to deposit change or hand over cash.

The Illinois State Toll Highway Authority tore out its last physical booth along the southern section of Interstate 294 this summer, more than four years after the agency stopped using booths during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It's left some former toll collectors nostalgic for the time when they could offer customer service in person.

"Whatever [customers] needed, we had it," said Clovia Lockridge, who collected tolls from 2012 until the system went dormant in March 2020, amid COVID-19 lockdowns.

Lockridge remembers helping customers with directions, maps and even replacement Velcro for toll transponders, free of charge.

"Not only were we sticking our hands out collecting tolls, we were the face of the tollway," said Lockridge, 44, who usually worked at Plaza 43 in the south suburbs.

Now tollway drivers must use an I-Pass or, if they are traveling from out of state and don't use a compatible E-ZPass, must pay online or get a bill in the mail.

“The world is a little colder without human contact options," said Joseph Schwieterman, a DePaul University professor and veteran researcher on transportation issues.

The shift to all-electronic tolling is the latest move to automate more aspects of transportation. Bus company Greyhound recently stopped accepting cash. Metra last year closed its ticketing windows, leaving commuters to use either an app or vending machines.

The Illinois Tollway stopped using toll booths in 2020 and made the move permanent a year later. Now the agency is removing the concrete barriers that divided the booths at plazas and on ramps, creating a fully open road toll system.

“The tollway is now an all-electronic, or cashless system. That means we don’t need a lot of this infrastructure," Illinois Tollway chief engineering officer Manar Nashif said in an interview.

The tollway hasn't decided what to do with the toll booth lanes.

“Right now, we're just focused on removing that infrastructure,” Nashif said.

The Illinois Tollway first opened to traffic in 1958, envisioned as a bypass around the urban core of Chicago, according to a tollway history.

When the system opened, the six toll plazas along the Tri-State charged 30 cents each. The original system also included the Northwest Highway, now called the Jane Addams Memorial, and East-West Tollway, now the Reagan Memorial.

A 1958 job notice in the Chicago Sun-Times said the Tollway Authority was looking to employ 80 men, age 24 or older, as toll collectors. Pay started at $3,900 a year.

Over decades, the agency expanded to operate more than 290 miles of tollway in 12 counties.

Tollways nationwide began going cashless about two decades ago as toll authorities embraced transponder technology.

Cashless lanes can handle at least five times as many cars as tollbooth lanes, according to the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. Electronic tolling also cuts down on emissions from cars that would otherwise stop to pay tolls. It’s cheaper, too, with about $135,000 in annual savings per lane versus manual collection, according to the same report.

“For large systems like Illinois, this is a godsend,” said Mark Muriello, vice president of policy and government affairs at the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association. “This really speeds people along.”

About two-thirds of tollways in America are now electronic-only, Muriello said.

The pandemic accelerated the shift to all-electronic tolling. The Illinois Tollway, which began open road tolling in 2005, almost immediately shifted to all-electronic tolling during the pandemic.

Nashif said when the pandemic hit, most Illinois tollway users were already I-Pass users.

“This is a natural way that we’ve been headed,” he said.

The shift to cashless tolling has had consequences for out-of-state travelers.

“As someone who travels across the United States in rental cars, it's daunting,” Schwieterman said. “Do I need to download an app? Or bring my own pass? It's very tricky.”

Cashless tolling has also left toll collectors in the lurch.

When the Illinois Tollway went all cashless in 2020, it reassigned its toll collectors as customer service representatives. The tollway still employs nearly 150 of them but has plans to lay them off at the end of August.

SEIU Local 73, which represents the tollway workers, is negotiating the layoffs with Illinois Tollway in the hopes it will change its mind about outsourcing the call-taker jobs to a nonprofit organization.

Lockridge, one of the former toll collectors and a member of the union bargaining committee, said customer service will take a hit if she and her co-workers are laid off.

"If you know a toll collector, you know they are dedicated," Lockridge said, "It's something that's in their heart. It's something they've always done."