Toll Collector

Toll Collector

TollBoothGuy

5 Years Experience

Brooklyn, NY

Male, 33

I spent just short of five years as a toll collector on the western end of New York State. Ask me anything, but please don't pay me in pennies.

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122 Questions

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Last Answer on September 11, 2020

Best Rated

I was once let thru a toll booth being a penny short. Could the collector have gotten in trouble for that?

Asked by snow bunny about 10 years ago

Nope! In our system, collectors are audited based on what they their expected cash total is versus what they deposited. A deficit that small would not be flagged for review. Through the course of a shift, collectors are often shorted by some amount of change by a number of cars and conversely sometimes cars drop too much in our hands and drive off. Oddly enough it generally evens out well enough. There were a couple times where I got shorted a bit and threw a dollar or two in my tray because I never made it back.

Don't sweat a penny though. Trust me, we ALWAYS have pennies laying around.

Can i pay with $100 bill?

Asked by nie nie over 9 years ago

My system did accept $100 bills. The only caveat is that we took the license plate numbers of cars that paid with anything larger than a 20. We linked the plate number to the bill and sent in a form as part of the audit.

Got lost ay airport and did not have enough change for booth

Asked by ana about 9 years ago

Sorry, I didn't know how to answer this question 3 months ago. I hope you found your way out.

if customer is complaining about toll how you will explain them?

Asked by jems over 9 years ago

What can you say, really? Drivers agree to pay the toll the moment they enter the portion of highway that is designated 'toll road'. I was never given official strategies to deal with customers that didn't want to pay a toll. If they had specific questions about the system or why they were being charged a certain amount I was happy to answer them but if you just drive up and complain about the concept of a toll my general response was something along the lines of 

 ¯\_(?)_/¯ 

Hey, thanks for your great thread here. I really enjoyed reading all the questions and answers. I work in tolls in Ohio, and just advanced to full time from part time. It took me just about 11 years. Some days i love the job, others , well. :)

Asked by Ohio toll guy about 10 years ago

Congratulations! Full-time work in this field is good if you can get it. Happy to hear that you've been able to work your way up to it!

Thank you so much for your kind words. I hope that I have been able to give people an accurate insight into a day in the life. At this point, you're probably more qualified than I to be answering questions about the job. I've come across so many people whose eyes light up when I tell them I used to be a collector. It just seems to be one of those mysterious jobs people wonder about and I hope I've been able to convey that we're just people standing in metal boxes in the middle of a big road(with some good stories).

People are terrible. But sometimes they're okay. And that's enough for me to keep showing up everyday. Good luck out there brother.

Has anyone ever given you concert tickets, alcohol or other random things to pass through instead of the American dollar?

Asked by Bill W. over 10 years ago

Never been offered anything like that. If it were to happen, it's a bit tricky. Collectors on the road that I worked on are audited every shift by both axle count and money totals. Additionally, patrons have a ticket that must be surrendered upon their exit. If you accept something in lieu of money, the axle count will be off, and the processed ticket will add to your money total for the night. If you were to accept something from a driver, you would still somehow need to account for the axles coming through your lane and the money dictated by the exit ticket. So if a driver gave me something instead of his $1.50 toll, I'd still need to account for that money.



Was it easy getting the toll collector job?

Asked by Michael almost 9 years ago

I mean, it was harder than walking into places of business and handing them a resume. The authority I worked for tended to hire in classes so you kind of had to just keep calling to gauge if they were hiring a group, especially during the years-long gap in which there was no civil service test offered. Once they exhausted the entire list of acceptable candidates that had taken the test, they would hire off the street, so at the end of the day difficulty is kind of directly correlated to timing.