■ CRITICAL RISK ■ Transportation & Logistics
This one isn't a prediction — it's an obituary. Electronic tolling has already gutted the toll booth workforce, and the remaining booths exist mostly because a few agencies haven't finished the paperwork to close them.
“Electronic tolling made you a relic faster than the coins you collected.”
Our AI replacement risk score — how we score jobs
A toll collector's shift is a loop measured in seconds: take cash through a window, make change from a till, hand back a receipt, wave the car through, balance the drawer at the end of the shift. Add in dealing with drivers who have no cash, drivers with exact change flung in the general direction of the basket, and the occasional lost tourist asking for directions. It's honest work, but every single piece of it is a transaction a sensor can do faster.
And sensors do. E-ZPass-style transponders, license plate cameras, and all-electronic tolling gantries process vehicles at highway speed with no booth, no queue, and no drawer to balance. Entire toll systems — bridges, turnpikes, whole state networks — have converted to cashless operation, often accelerating during 2020 and simply never converting back. When a car without a transponder passes, the camera reads the plate and mails an invoice. There is no step in that pipeline that wants a human in a booth breathing exhaust fumes for eight hours.
What resists automation here is not the work but the edge cases around it: disputed charges, plate misreads, toll violation processing, and customer service for people whose invoices went to an old address. Those jobs exist — in back offices, not booths — and they're fewer, different, and increasingly handled by software too. Our risk score of 76 is arguably generous; it reflects the fact that some collectors have been absorbed into those administrative roles rather than any durability in the booth itself.
Automatability: our editorial assessment of current and near-term AI capability
The disruption isn't coming — it came, and it didn't even slow down at the booth. All-electronic tolling has been rolling across highway networks for over a decade, with cash lane closures accelerating sharply since 2020. The handful of remaining cash booths are scheduled conversions, not survivors. Anyone still in this job should treat every fiscal year as potentially the last one with a booth in it.
Barely. Most agencies stopped recruiting collectors years ago and are running out remaining cash lanes with existing staff. New postings you see are usually for toll operations or customer service center roles — the back-office jobs that process electronic tolling disputes — not booth positions. If a booth job does appear, assume it comes with a conversion date attached.
A stack of unglamorous hardware: transponder readers (E-ZPass and its regional cousins), overhead cameras that photograph license plates, and software that matches plates to accounts or mails invoices. All-electronic gantries process cars at full highway speed, which is why agencies love them — throughput goes up, staffing costs go to nearly zero, and nobody has to handle cash.
Move toward the parts of tolling that still employ people: violation review, customer disputes, transponder account service, and traffic operations. Many agencies offered internal transfers during conversions — take one if it's still on the table. Outside tolling, cash-handling and customer-facing experience transfers to transit agencies, parking operations, and government clerk roles that are automating more slowly.
Mostly bureaucratic lag, union agreements, and a shrinking population of drivers without transponders or trackable plates. A few facilities keep staffed lanes for oversize vehicle processing or cash-preferred routes. None of those reasons are growing; all of them are being engineered away as agencies finish their cashless conversions.