Tokens going to the scrap metal merchants - Delaware River Bridge melts some history

Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission (DRJTBC) is sending its inventory of tokens to a scrap metal merchant - a reminder of the changing technology of toll collection. The tokens with a face value of 10c each were used to provide commuter discounts for three decades through Dec 2002 when transponder based tolling was introduced by DRJTBC (known colloquially as 'Doctor J').

For the past several years the Commission has been redeeming old tokens that are turned in. But the redemption period ended the Commission has decided there's no point in just storing them in the vault room at their Mt Hope-Lambethville offices.

Executive-director Frank G McCartney is quoted in a statement: "While there is some nostalgia associated with them, we figured the best thing we could do is recycle them."

There's an estimated 3.3 million weighing an estimated 23k pds (10.4t) of the brass/zinc discs in canvas bags piled 7ft (2m) high in the storage vault.

Easton Iron & Metal of Easton PA will pay $54.4k for the coins or $2.37/pd ($5,220/ton) or 2c each.

We hope they haven't forgotten the collectors. Nostalgia it may be, but the collectors constitute a market for tokens, well perhaps for a tiny fraction of the DRJTBC's hoard. People are paying $4 on eBay for DRJTBC tokens, though perhaps not the current ones. See our illustrations from eBay sellers.

Some automatic coin machines handled tokens almost exclusively especially at the end of the coin machine era - the last third of the 20th century. With the quarter (25c) the largest commonly circulating coin inflation took tolls to the point where they needed four or more coins to pay the toll. The token was the asnwer. Typically it was "GOOD FOR ONE PASSAGE" as was emblazoned on one face, and the token could be upvalued with tolls.

Rolls of ten or 20 were sold at a discount on their face value as a way to give commuters or regular user a break over others. Since the introduction of electronic tolling beginning in 1988 coin machines and tokens have been on the way out - because transponders were of most value to the same commuters who were using tokens previously.

Some toll authorities pulled out their coin machines completely to accelerate the switch to transponders forcing commuters to go for electronic tolling.

The Triborough (MTA) Bridge and Tunnel Authority under CEO Michael Ascher was notable for its gutsy decision to go cold turkey to transponders in 1997, removing all coin machines. Others phased them out. Coin machines remain for coins, mostly at remote ramp plazas, but also a few lanes here and there at mainline plazas.

But toll tokens are pretty much gone.

HISTORY

Tokens appear to go back deep into the history of tolling - see the rectangular token of the Wrightsville & Chanceford Turnpike Company in eastern Pennsylvania dating to early in the 19th century. (The Present Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission would have you believe private toll concessions are a radical new idea but there were hundreds of them in Pennsylvania 180 years ago.)

Early efforts to automate coin or token payment involved coin in the slot technology which goes back to the beginning of the 20th century for sale of snacks and soda. The real challenge to developing effective coin machines for toll collection was the need to get away from a slot - awkward for a motorist to use reaching the left arm out the window of a car. Hence the basket into which the motorist can drop or throw coins. Reliable mechanisms to effectively handle tumbling coins took several decades to develop.

Here we continue with extracts from a piece from TOLL ROADS Newsletter #34 Dec 1998:

The first toll in the world was taken by an automatic coin machine (ACM) on New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway (GS Pkwy) in 1953, according to Al Palmer an industry veteran, now (1998) operating a modest consulting business Palmer and Associates out of Camarillo CA, while also running up 5,000mi/mth searching out records of old toll roads for a history of North American turnpikes that he’s working on.

Two companies Taller & Cooper of Brooklyn for whom Palmer worked, and Grant Money Meter of Providence RI, each provided test machines to the GS Pkwy. The tests were conducted at the Fairlawn ramp plazas, one company’s machine on either side. Both worked about equally well, Palmer recalls, and the first production model machines were installed at the Bergen and Union mainline plazas of the busy northern section of the Parkway. They spread its length in the next two years while ACMs were also installed on the Chicago Skyway, and the Boston end of the Massachusetts Turnpike. By the mid-60s they were on the Kentucky system (since de-tolled) and Oklahoma and were being installed here and there all over the country.

The secret to the success of these coin machines was efficiently handling thrown coins. Earlier efforts to apply coin-in-the-slot technology from the vending and ticket issuing business failed. Taller & Cooper’s principal business was selling fare machines for buses and they were helped in designing a workable ACM by already having ability to build gear that handled coins in a lurching, bumping bus, Palmer says.

They were known in the trade as Tollomatics first, but that was a brand name, so the generic name become Automatic Toll Machines (ATMs). But when the banks came out with Automatic Teller Machines in the late 1970s the acronym ATM was regarded as confusing so ‘Coin’ was substituted to produce a new distinctive acronym ACM.

TransCore bought the rights from Cubic to the last of the electromechanical ACMs that trace their ancestry back to the inventors Taller & Cooper and Grant. Rugged machines they still provide good service at many toll lanes around the country. But they are gradually being replaced by a new generation of electronic equipment that is slightly faster, is easier to program and better at distinguishing slugs and foreign coins.

French, Japanese and Australian companies remain manufacturing coin machines, the last American machines having been made back in the 1980s by Cubic. For a while longer parts for the old electromechanical machines were stocked.

TOLLROADSnews 2007-04-30