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It was a technological improvement, letting us pay tolls from our car by tossing coins in a basket.
Now, technology improvements are making those exact-change machines obsolete.
Roll up, stop, chuck some change in the basket, then off you go on SR-408.
Using exact change for tolls is getting more and more rare.
“Over 96% of our customers are electronic with their transponders like E-pass. The others use the pay by plate,” Brian Hutchings of Central Florida Expressway Authority said.
So with less than 4% using the exact change baskets and the basket technology aging:
“The exact-change baskets along our system will be a thing of the past in the next couple of years,” Hutchings said.
There are 96 basket machines in all. The 26 along 408 itself should be gone by the end of next year. The ramp machines will be taken out in 2024.
Part of the issue is the age of the machines themselves, the manufacturer doesn’t even support them anymore and parts are hard to get.
On top of that, a lot of things go in the basket that are not coins.
“You have people who are throwing in objects, other than exact coins, so it gums up the works and impacts the machines so we have to send technicians out to do maintenance of them,” Hutchings said.
He sent us an image to show the things that end up in the basket — a bolt, a shotgun shell, bottle caps, a fish hook and a blade for a utility knife.
It’s all an issue for machines not being used all that often these days, and the latest toll roads, like the Wekiva Parkway, are cashless anyway.
“Our customers are showing us what they prefer by driving the system and paying electronically or pay by plate,” Hutchings said.
People taking cash in person at toll booths will stay.
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