Illinois Collected $1.58 Billion in Tolls the Year the Last Toll Collector Clocked Out

The Illinois Tollway opened in 1958 with a job notice in the Chicago Sun-Times calling for 80 men, age 24 or older, to collect 30 cents a car at six toll plazas.▸ It closed out 2024 with none. Between March and September of that year, the agency laid off the last of its human toll collectors — a 294-mile system that took in more money than ever, collected entirely by machine.

None of this was a shortfall.▸ The Illinois Tollway is user-funded — it gets no state or federal money for maintenance and operations — and 2024 was a strong year for the toll booth that no longer exists: $1.58 billion in tolls and evasion recovery, per the Illinois Tollway's 2024 Annual Report, plus $88 million in investment income and $28 million in concessions and miscellaneous revenue. That money funded $768 million set aside for future capital work, $490 million in debt service, and $441 million to maintain and operate a system that, by the end of the year, had no toll booths left to staff.

The economics were never close.▸ A dedicated electronic lane can process about 1,800 vehicles an hour under all-electronic tolling, versus roughly 350 for a staffed manual lane — more than five times the throughput, per the Texas A&M Transportation Institute's research on toll systems. TTI puts the operating and maintenance savings at $135,000 per lane, per year, for all-electronic tolling over a staffed tollbooth — a figure the Chicago Sun-Times cited directly from the same research when covering the removal of the tollway's last physical booths in the summer of 2024.

The people cost came due on a slower clock than the toll booths did.▸ Illinois went cashless system-wide during the pandemic, in March 2020, and made the change permanent in 2021 — but kept roughly 150 toll collectors, money-room drivers, and money-room employees on payroll as reassigned customer-service staff, represented by SEIU Local 73. In March 2024 the agency told that whole unit its jobs were ending, proposing to outsource the work to a nonprofit call-center contractor. By July, after months of pushback, SEIU Local 73 reported the Tollway Board had negotiated severance for "nearly 120" toll collectors who would be laid off that September.

Toll-collector headcount figures come from SEIU Local 73's public statements during the 2024 layoff fight, not from an audited Tollway payroll record; the union's own language ("nearly 120") is preserved rather than rounded to a false precision. Revenue and allocation figures are drawn from the Tollway's preliminary 2024 financial summary and are independently rounded, as noted above.