The art of the dodge

Increasingly, drivers on toll roads are living by the mantra: “pics or it didn’t happen.”

As government agencies continue to transition away from human toll-booth operators and towards automated toll booths that snap a picture of a car’s license plate to then send an invoice in the mail, data indicates toll-dodging is going up.

• The Dallas and San Francisco areas say they missed out on more than $33 million combined in tolls last year due to people obfuscating their license plates.
• MTA Bridges and Tunnels, which operates seven bridges and two tunnels in New York City, lost nearly $21 million, a 137% jump from 2020.
• Port Authority officers, who monitor facilities in NJ and NY including the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, in 2023 roughly doubled the number of summonses issued for obstructed, missing, or fictitious license plates from the year before.

The methods: Some toll dodgers use license plate flippers (pictured above) to trick the cameras and bypass tolls. Other drivers take a more creative route, jury-rigging their plates with face masks or duct tape. One even taped a Cheetos bag over their car’s tag (forget Oliver Twist’s Jack Dawkins, that’s the real Artful Dodger).

👀 Looking ahead… Officials are cracking down on toll-dodging. In New York, legislation has been introduced that would allow police to arrest drivers for theft of services if they were caught using a mechanical or electronic device like a flipper.