Posted on 05/03/2021 7:24:04 AM PDT by NohSpinZone
Larry Collins has met quite a few celebrities over the years at his job. Niners Hall of Famer Joe Montana stopped by with a trailer full of horses once. NBA legend Bill Russell was the nicest, stopping to chat with him for a few minutes. Another NFL Hall of Famer, Ronnie Lott, even gave him an autograph.
Collins said he’s probably met many more famous people without even realizing it.
But Collins doesn’t work at a fancy restaurant or in the VIP area of a concert venue — he was a Bay Area toll collector for 23 years on the Carquinez Bridge at the northeastern end of San Francisco Bay.
After spending decades smiling at drivers and telling them to have a good day, he’ll never see the inside of a toll booth again — because they won’t exist anymore.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I certainly will not miss old toll collecting methods. I don't have FasTrak but you can still drive through and they send you the toll via your license plate information. It has sped up the traffic through the bridges considerably.
For all the unions pounding the table for higher minimum wages, you are fighting progress and ingenuity. The jobs that can be automated will be and your rancor will only hasten the transition. Nobody misses gas lamp lighters. Just saying.
Toll collectors have gone the way of elevator operators.
If only Sonny Corleone had EZ-Pay.
“Toll collectors have gone the way of elevator operators.”
They are just the first of many old jobs to disappear post pandemic.
Disappearing jobs has been an American Tradition basically forever.
And now they photograph each car going through a toll booth (manned or unmanned)...and into a database it goes, who has access to that information, how long is it stored, who knows?
Uh, Larry is the last guy in more ways then one: most of his co-collectors had far more unpronouncable names.
Being hit up for cash by foreigners was one of the more unpleasant points about heading to Tahoe after the 1990s.
Won’t miss any of them. As for the bridge tolls themselves, it’s a ripoff - those bridges were built and paid for decades ago and the overblown tolls were merely more payola for the Rat party to employ lotsa Larrys.
I famous quote these days is the following
“Zoom ain’t gonna put solar panels on your roof and rewire your main electrical panel”
OK, right there we KNOW this article is a pure lie. No such toll collector ever existed on God's Green Earth.
“you are fighting progress and ingenuity”
I understand what you are saying, but I am concerned about what will happen with millions of men when there are no jobs for people who don’t have advanced degrees. As they say, the devils makes work for idle hands.
Heh, that’s good!
I remember clearly the day I arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the summer of 1973. I was driving all my worldly possessions in a U-Haul van I had driven from Ohio. As I went through Benicia on I-680, I saw a sign at the bridge over the Sacramento River that said “Free Directions.”
I thought to myself “Wow, what a great, friendly state to offer free directions to travelers.”
It took me a long time to figure out the sign really read “Free Direction” (not “Directions”) and it meant there was no toll when you were headed TOWARD San Francisco. The area has always made it free to get in, but you have to pay to LEAVE.
Somewhere along the line, they took down the old “Free Direction” signs. I miss those. And I never did see any tourist info spot on I-680 where I could stop and get those free directions.
Covid didn’t end his job, technology did.
Hah
I remember that sign too
Gave me a sense of relief on one trip home from Truckee - didn’t have any cash on me!
I’m glad somebody else remembers it because, as the years roll by, I begin to wonder “Did I really see that sign?”
That is true and that is why we see a lot of R&D money going into fully automating fast food restaurants, in which your order will be nearly 100% prepared by robots.
As for human toll collecting, I'm sort of glad to see that go. I don't miss the backups at the booths as drivers in front of me found ways to gum up the works such as not having the proper change handy, dropping their money on the ground (and having to search wildly for it), chatting with the collector about the weather or whatnot.
Of course, the fact that we have tolls at all annoy me. Now that they are being collected electronically, it can only mean one thing - the tolls will rise more rapidly and appear in more places.
Systemically racist. Does anyone think it’s a coincidence that The Man is replacing jobs predominately done by People of Color (like Mr. Collins in this article) with technology??? You don’t see them replacing white-people jobs like physics professor with cameras and computers now, do you???
I remember many years ago when they were ranking jobs from best to worst, toll collector was near the bottom because of the boring, repetitious work.
The perfect job to be automated. It’s remarkable that these jobs weren’t automated years ago. I think union influence on bridge commissions and transportation departments had something to do with that.
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