By Jim Cameron
Special to WestportNowAs a college student in the early 1970s, I had a summer job as a toll collector on the Tappan Zee Bridge.
Boring job but great pay. But it was clear, even then, that toll collection would become automated, at first with special lanes with those baskets you’d throw your change into (assuming you had the correct change).
By the early ‘80s, New York and Pennsylvania toll authorities (which between them make up two-thirds of the nation’s $3 billion a year tolling industry) began experimenting with electronic toll tags, as much to reduce congestion at booths as to replace human collectors.
But it was Oklahoma that introduced the first electronic toll system, The Pikepass in 1991.