I’ve been dreading this week. Anxiously anticipating this Friday when the toll booths and toll workers on the Mass Pike so familiar to me will be gone. Its the result of a decidedly bureaucratic change in state transportation policy, but it feels very personal. I’m nostalgic today thinking back to moments riding on the toll road: getting on the Pike after graduation, our family car crammed with my stuff, setting out to see friends to show off my brand new used car, and heading west for any number of all day jaunts with my girlfriend group shopping at the outlets. All those trips marked by slowing down to go through the tolls and enjoying a brief ‘How’s it going?” and “Thank you” exchange with the latex gloved toll collectors.
I never imagined a time when I wouldn’t be handing over my money in the cash only line. Yep, I’m one of the estimated 24 percent of drivers on Massachusetts toll roads who have not purchased EZ Pass transponders. I’ve deliberately avoided it. But, on Friday at 10 pm when the state fires up the automated Open Road Tolling, drivers with EZ Pass will have the financial advantage. The giant concrete and steel gantries replacing the manned booths are programmed to read the Passes, which drivers can get for free. Drivers like me without an EZ Pass will pay a surcharge for the system to capture pictures of our license plate and be billed. I’ll soon find out if the surcharge will move me to get a transponder because right now, I don’t intend to.
I’m also mad that the switch to automated tolling is really a bit of a bait and switch. The state sold the plan as a way to save 50 million dollars by taking down the booths, increasing safety, alleviating congestions and reducing Greenhouse gases. Not long after setting the wheels in motion, calculations revealed the total savings will be a fraction of that-- just 5 million. While I agree that 5 million is not chump change, I feel like a chump for having been sold the 50-million-dollar bill of goods.
What’s more, I hate to see yet another instance of automation replacing people. I know any number of studies have warned that this is the future. It doesn’t make it any easier.The 400 part time or full time toll booth workers will lose their jobs –the senior 200 are eligible for early retirement, others a cash stipend based on years of service, and still others will get priority for 86 guaranteed Mass Dot jobs. Management theorist Andrew McAfee often cites an Oxford University study which predicts one in every two human jobs are at high risk of being replaced by machines. But, my years of driving the Mass Pike have taught me that Waze and Google maps can never match both the expertise and the patience of the kind toll workers. A shout out to the too many to count--who guided directionally challenged me back to a road I recognize. No gantry can do that.
Many of the old toll plazas will remain in place, though closed down, while the state starts the process of taking them down. They will all be gone by the end of next year. And every time I pass through one of those Big Brother gantries I’ll worry about the machines recording my travels, and storing it for God knows how long. Who knows where all the information will end up? Another reminder that the march of progress may be inevitable, but it is never free.
