NTSB calls to eliminate toll booths where you can pay cash after deadly crash

By Aaron Cooper, CNN

(CNN) — This week, the National Transportation Safety Board called to eliminate manual toll payment lanes – where drivers can pay cash – from highway toll plazas after an SUV slowing down to change lanes was hit by a tractor-trailer, killing two people and injuring three.

The August 2024 wreck – at the Interstate 80 toll plaza near Swanton, Ohio, west of Toledo – could have been avoided if the highway only had electronic tolling and provided clearer information about toll payment options, the board said in a final report published Wednesday.

“Had the Swanton Toll Plaza been configured for fully electronic tolling, the crash would have been avoided,” the NTSB said.

In the crash, a Toyota SUV was traveling in the left of two high-speed toll lanes around 5:30 a.m. when the driver suddenly slowed down and merged right. She was going 15 mph in the right high-speed lane, preparing to cross an empty median to get to the manual lanes, according to the NTSB. Moments later, a tractor-trailer going the 70 mph speed limit slammed into the back of the vehicle. The slow-speed lanes the driver was trying to reach were marked at 10 mph.

“She tried to enter the low-speed toll booth access lanes at the last possible moment,” the NTSB wrote. “We found that the SUV driver was experiencing loss of situation awareness, likely as the result of fatigue, and that the truck driver did not have enough time to react to her lane incursion and rapid deceleration.”

The truck hit the SUV then a concrete barrier and both vehicles overturned. Two passengers in the Toyota were killed. Another SUV passenger and both drivers were seriously injured. The only person wearing a seat belt was the SUV driver, investigators said.

In the subsequent highway traffic backup there were two additional wrecks, including at least eight vehicles.

The high-speed lanes were equipped with transponder readers that could deduct tolls from drivers with in-car toll passes as well as license tag readers that could charge tolls to vehicles without transponders, NTSB investigators noted. License plate tolls could either be paid online or when the highway authority mailed the registered owner a bill, but the signs before the toll plaza said high-speed lanes were only for vehicles with an EZ-Pass transponder.

Investigators reviewing video of the toll plaza found more than 1,000 drivers made similar last-minute lane changes in the three weeks before the crash.

“The video review showed that unsafe merging and weaving of vehicles approaching the plaza is occurring consistently, more than twice per hour on average, and is clearly a problem beyond the SUV driver in this crash,” the NTSB said.

Investigators concluded that while hybrid toll plazas – which feature high-speed and slow-speed lanes – are safer than entirely manual ones, doing away with all the slow–speed toll booths entirely would reduce the need for lane changes and eliminate the resulting wrecks.

In recommendations to the Federal Highway Administration, Ohio and an association of toll owners and operators, the NTSB advocated for fully electronic tolling, citing the “inherent safety risk” of vehicles going at different speeds and changing lanes to pay tolls, as well as for better presentation of toll options to drivers.

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