By easy pass I mean an electronic device that you preload with a certain amount of money for the tolls and then every time you pass under or through a toll platform it automatically registers that you have a pass and dings your account for whatever the applicable toll is.
They go by different names in different places. In Florida it is called a SunPass, in California a FasTrak, and EZPass in other states. (Please pardon me if I got the names wrong).
Nome of the roads or highways where I grew up in the Midwest were toll roads so my first experience with paying tolls was driving to college, which required me to stop and pay a toll at a good fashioned toll booth on one of the state highways I had to take.
After college, I never lived in another place that had any toll roads until we just moved. We vacationed in Florida and would occasionally take the Florida Turnpike, which also had good old fashioned toll boths, but that was before I myself was driving.
In any event, when I was interviewing for what eventually became my new job in this city, my wife and I drove down and discovered that all the highways and most major roads here generally all have various portions that are tolled. It surprised me that there are no toll booths, which helps traffic move much more smoothly, but the the thing that surprised me the most was the difference in tolls between those who had the city's version of an easy pass system and those who were just billed by their license plate-the prices for those with the easy pass are half of that paid by the "toll by plate" drivers who don't have a pass.
Further, and depending on what kind of hurry you are in, some of the express lanes on the highways here are only available to those drivers with an easy pass-using those lanes without the pass means you are going to get nailed for a $100 fine.
Upon investigating this further, the actual easy pass transponder itself only costs $10.00, which probably paid for itself within two weeks for me. It was simple to buy one at the grocery store and then I just set up an online account and have it set to automatically replenish the funds in my account every time my balance hits $10.00. I did the same for my wife's car.
My wife's new job requires a commute over a bridge that requires a toll so we are also saving $0.60 on her commute every day.
I know that doesn't seem like much but let's take just her daily commute as an example of how the small amounts you save on a daily basis can add up over time. Say she commutes 5 days per week for 10 months (she is a teacher) and her saving $0.60 per day results in an annual savings of $120. That does not even factor in what she saves when she drives anywhere else, whether on the weekend or after school-that is just on her daily commute.
Anyway, the whole point of this is to point out how much you can save if you sign up for whatever version of easy pass your city or state offers. It may not seem like much on a daily basis but that $0.30 on my wife's drive to or from work can add up over the course of a year.
This whole discussion will probably strike those of you from large urban areas as silly, but some of my friends in major cities just never bothered to sign up for their version of an easy pass. Please make sure you do that if you are somewhere with lots of toll roads.
As my mother once said, a dollar in your pocket is better than a dollar in someone else's pocket.
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