Dulles Toll Road to go cashless starting in March

The Dulles Toll Road will transition to all-electronic toll collection starting on March 1, and exact change will no longer be accepted.

Through Feb. 28, drivers will still be able to use the exact change machines, which take quarters and dollar coins.

The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which governs the toll road, will phase out toll booths and shuttered coin machines so as to convert them to lanes. Manned toll booths stopped operation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The MWAA decided to shutter the coin machines for multiple reasons. Firstly, they were used far less than non-cash options. In 2022, only 726,367 transactions were paid in cash, a mere 2% of total transactions on the Dulles Toll Road.

Authorities also expect the removal of booths to speed up traffic, thereby lessening emissions from idling vehicles.

“If you think about it, there’s five toll roads in the region. We are the last one that takes cash. Cash is very labor intensive. It’s very cumbersome,” Dulles Toll Road Manager Stephen Settle told TV station WRC-4, the NBC affiliate in Washington.

Previously in 2019, 34 toll booths were removed to create E-ZPass express lanes.

E-ZPass transponders are registered to a user’s account; antennae in toll lanes read the information from the transponder and then charge the toll to the account. Accounts are able to register multiple transponders.

E-ZPass can be used for tolls in the following states: Minnesota, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana.

The service will soon be expanded to Georgia, according to the E-ZPass website.

For those motorists without an E-ZPass transponder, the toll lane will read a car’s license plate and send an invoice to the address associated with the vehicle. That invoice can be paid online.

While E-ZPass users will continue to pay $4 at the toll plaza and $2 on the ramps, those without an E-ZPass will pay $5.60 and $3.60 respectively, to reflect processing costs.