Toll roads have been a part of American life since the first such paths opened for business in Pennsylvania and New York in the late 18th century.
From the very beginning, passage on these roads required horse riders — and later vehicle drivers — to come face-to-face with a toll collector. But not anymore.
(Fred Bellet/Photo)
Last week, the Veterans Expressway parted ways with its last toll collector when the Florida Department of Transportation officially closed the Sugarwood plaza just south of the Pasco County line. It’s the end of an era, as drivers no longer need to rummage for loose change in their car. Instead, SunPass transponders and license plate scanners will help drivers pay the required toll as cash itself becomes obsolete on the Veterans.
“Unlike the old days, back when we first built the Florida Turnpike in the 1950s, most of the people who use roads like this are not people on a leisurely vacation drive,” said Christa Deason, public information officer for Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise. “Now they are commuters, and they are on a fast track to get to work in the morning, and get home at night. They want to keep driving.”
Sugarwood accepted its last cash toll around midnight Sept. 4. By late Friday afternoon, drivers heading north or south on the Veterans no longer had to stop. Technology had won.
When the Veterans Expressway first opened in 1994, traveling the 15-mile stretch was possible only by cash or a rarely used prepaid card that required a hefty cash balance. FDOT introduced SunPass on the Veterans in 2001 after a successful rollout two years earlier on the Florida Turnpike.
At first, SunPass was embraced by a select few, but that has changed over the years, Deason said. Now a third of Florida’s drivers are SunPass users, and 84 percent of travelers on the Veterans and the Suncoast Parkway have a transponder in their car.
“This is just a logical evolution of the road,” Deason said. “Fewer and fewer people were paying cash, and we’ve been phasing out collectors ever since.”
The introduction of the Suncoast in 2001 has caused traffic to explode on the Veterans, especially Pasco residents looking to get to jobs in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, Deason said.
In its first year, more than 19,500 cars drove through the Anderson toll plaza each day, while 8,600 ventured past Sugarwood. Now, Anderson welcomes 59,400 cars each day, while Sugarwood deals with 44,200.
That prompted the state to spend $380 million to not only convert the Veterans to cash-free tolling, but to expand the roadway to six lanes. It’s created a mess along the road, with commuters having to navigate through construction cones. But this could be the last major construction project on the Veterans … ever.
“We don’t have any more room to expand the road,” said Tracie Rose, a Lutz-based project engineer with Jacobs Engineering, the firm contracted by FDOT to complete the work. “This will be as wide as we get. So it’s going to have to last us.”
Now that the toll conversion is complete, work crews can fully concentrate on widening the road. But even with that focus, the project won’t be completed until 2016.
Deason didn’t have an exact count of the number of toll collectors the Veterans employed at its peak, but did say that the state has been winding down hiring new collectors over the past several years. The few that were left up to last week have either moved on, or are getting help from the company that managed the toll collectors.
“We had some long-term employees,” Deason said. “We even had one or two that started out on the Sunshine Skyway Bridge back when they accepted tokens. Some of them took this opportunity to finally get that chance to retire.”
The tollbooths located along the Suncoast, including the one between State Road 54 and State Road 52, will remain the way it is. Cash tolls are still collected in those main plazas, with the option of using a full-speed express lane around the plaza for those with SunPass.
Just so you know …
Michael Hinman, the reporter for this story, spent a little bit of time as a toll collector himself. He worked at both the Anderson Road and Sugarwood toll plazas in the mid-1990s, not long after the Veterans Expressway first opened.
Published September 10, 2014
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