By sometime next year, the Ambassador Bridge will no longer collect tolls in cash. According to www.tollroadsnews.com [[the toll-road gossip web site), starting in September, 2012, trucks inbound to the U.S. will no longer pay cash tolls. Tolls will be billed to an established account, with passage recorded by radio transceivers reading an RFID sticker. Trucks without a sticker will be photographed, and a bill sent to the registered owner. The Bridge was an early user of RFID tolls, and it is reported that half of all Ambassador Bridge traffic already has the account stickers. Stickers will be given away for free at the Bridge's duty-free store.

Cashless tolls will be extended to trucks outbound to Canada in another month or so, with auto traffic in both directions to become cashless sometime in 2013.

Cashless road tolls are becoming the norm in the toll business.

It is not yet announced how the Detroit International Bridge Company intends to treat tolls billed by mail to license-plate holders. Some other toll-road operators heavily surcharge these "video tolls," either in the form of a higher toll, or with a hefty charge for the first or second passage, to cover the cost of opening an account. On the cashless toll freeway around Toronto, the first trip is free; the second one triggers an inquiry to the Secretary of State, and a bill of around ten bucks which, if not paid, is treated as an unanswered traffic violation on your Michigan driver record. Other toll operators absorb the cost of researching users' addresses, or do not bill users from states with high look-up charges. I'm still waiting for the $10 bill I ran up on the toll bypass of Denver a few years ago. Some addresses may be bought from private data bases of vehicle registration numbers, but these are far from complete.

It costs $7.00 for a private toll operator to discover a Michigan vehicle registrant's address, by filing a form with the Secretary of State. The current auto toll is $4.75. It will be interesting to see how the bridge company decides to recover this cost from auto users. It may absorb the cost on the expectation that users will eventually return. If it surcharges video tolls, it will forfeit auto traffic to the tunnel, unless the tunnel adopts a similar system.