At the same time, tolls, or user fees, have become steadily less expensive to collect and more acceptable to motorists. Starting in 1989, the use of windshield-mounted transponders has allowed cashless toll collection. At first, most transponder or electronic tolling was conducted in single lanes with equipment retrofitted into old-style barrier toll plazas. Motorists could now roll through at 5 to 15 mph. In the past few years, development has enabled open-road tolling in which the center of the barrier plaza is bulldozed, and transponder tolling is conducted from a road-spanning overhead gantry in a section of multi-lane highway operating at full highway speed. On established toll roads, cash tolling is continued off to the side of the high-speed open road section.
Further developments include a new, batteryless, super-cheap sticker tag, which is a third of the price of present battery-powered transponders allowing the complete cessation of any on-road cash toll collection. Camera systems mounted on the over-the-road gantries can now record license plate numbers of passing vehicles; by accessing motor registry databases, owner names and addresses are extracted and bills and/or toll violation notices are sent. The new sticker tags, about the size of a credit card, are another revolution in technology. As they seem likely to become negligible in cost, the toll authorities will be able to give them away. As of 2005, close to two-thirds of the $8 billion collected in tolls were collected by transponders. The other third are occasional users of the toll facility or visitors to the area, and therefore unlikely to purchase a $25 transponder.
Toll roads are now being built with no cash collection at all. Under full open road tolling, no one stops to pay a toll; no wide toll plaza with booths must be built and no labor costs are incurred. The 91 Express Lanes and I-15 HOT lanes in Southern California, I-394 MnPASS Lanes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Westpark Tollway in Houston, Texas are examples of cashless, full open-road tolling in the U.S. Outside the U.S. the Melbourne, Australia CityLink toll road, E-470 in Toronto, Canada, three interconnected toll roads in Santiago, Chile, Singapore toll roads, H6 Trans Israel Highway, Central London Congestion Charging scheme and trucks tolling on the German and Austrian autobahns all use cashless open-road tolling with a combination of transponders and license plate-readable cameras. This is widely seen as "the way of the future" for toll roads. If it is of benefit to motorists, one or two lanes for cash collection and the "human touch" can be provided at a roadside service plaza off the main line of the toll road.
Toll authorities like this scenario because toll collection costs are significantly reduced and traffic flow is improved. Manual toll collectors can handle in the range of 300 to 600 vehicles per hour, coin machines 600 to 900. Single-lane roll-through transponder tolling can handle 1,000 to 1,400; open-road tolling can handle 2,000 to 2,500 per hour. This also puts an end to the frequent and disruptive fender benders, occasional serious rear-enders and hits on tollbooths from inattentive drivers.
Motorists like open-road tolling because they do not have to assemble coins or bills, queue and roll down their window every time they pay a toll. The transponder toll account becomes one of a number of monthly payments along with a mortgage, utilities and telephone, and is usually among the smaller fees. In the past, the motorist focused on the toll every time it had to be paid and was often irritated about the queue at the toll plaza. Indeed, on many toll roads the process of paying the toll was more painful than the toll itself.
In the wake of the technological revolution which has transformed toll collection in the past two decades, toll authorities have been able to deliver a greatly improved service to their patrons, and those patrons have become willing to accept significant toll rate increases.