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Ga. 400 tolls: The rain of falling quarters comes to an end
AROUND TOWN
JOE EARLE
The constant rain of quarters ended Nov. 22. The falling coins really did sound a bit like rain down in the tunnel beneath the Ga. 400 Toll Plaza. Coins drivers dropped into the toll-collection baskets on the road above rolled down metal tubes and then thumped into locked metal boxes placed at various spots along the 600-foot-long, concrete-walled tunnel. “During rush hour, it gets quite intense,” said Bert Brantley, deputy executive director of the State Road and Tollway Authority, who wore a reflective orange vest reading “Tolls end Nov. 22” as he led a media tour of the facility on Nov. 19. The rain of quarters, dimes and nickels yielded tens of millions of dollars over the 20 years the tolls were collected on Ga. 400. In recent years, the toll booths PHOTOS BY JOE EARLE have collected about $60,000 a day, half of that in coins, Brantley said. The State Road and Tollway Authority stopped collecting Ga. 400 tolls Landmarks come and go in Atlanta. on Nov. 22, after 20 years of dimes, nickles and quarters dropping We’re a burn-it-down-and-build-it-again into baskets. Above, the deposited coins traveled via metal tubes into kind of place. We save little. Take Turner locked boxes in a 600-foot-long tunnel beneath the toll plaza. Below, Field, the ballpark the Olympics gave to Michael Bent worked at the plaza for 17 years and is sad to see it go. Atlanta baseball. Now there’s a very public plan to move the Atlanta Braves to a new suburban home and tear down The Ted in a couple of years. There will be an outcry, no doubt, and discussions about how to save a brickand-steel ball field and keep the Braves downtown. But if the Braves do move, we metro Atlantans will get used to that. We always do. We’re not the kind of people who need our ballplayers to work the same hallowed ground where sports giants of past made their marks. We leave that to Boston or Chicago or New York. Here, once Turner Field opened, I couldn’t wait until the old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium was blown up. It blocked the view of downtown skyscrapers from seats in Turner Field. As a landmark, the Ga. 400 Toll Plaza isn’t on the same level as Turner Field, of course. Still, it’s a place we’ve all gotten used to and have grown to know. For lar, and they give you back 50 cents and throw the other 50 20 years, north metro drivers have tossed quarters into those cents into the basket. After a stint as a cashier, Bent moved up collection baskets as they fought traffic to and from Buckhead. to the building overlooking the plaza, where workers monitor Now we expect to stop and smile at the cashier as we fumble the computer screens that show a count of every single coin for change. It’s part of our routine. going into the collection baskets. Soon, it won’t even be a wide spot in the road. Soon, metro toll roads won’t have any cashiers at all. The A few will even miss it. Michael Bent will. He’s worked at system will be fully automated. Then, there will be few, if any, the plaza for 17 years. “It’s very sad,” he said, a memory of his people left to tell the stories of the tollways. It’s the stories that native Jamaica accenting his words. “It’s been here all these make places come alive and keep them alive long after they’re years. It’s like home here.” gone. It’s the tales that matter. He started as a cashier. And don’t call them “toll collecTh e Ga. 400 Tollway Plaza leaves behind its share of tales. tors,” SRTA folks are quick to say. Toll roads in other towns Th e cashiers tell them. The people who sat for hours in the may have toll collectors, but metro Atlanta doesn’t. They don’t booths, making change, remember the drivers, the ones who collect tolls. Instead, they make change. You give them a dol-
NOV. 29 – DEC. 12, 2013 | www.ReporterNewspapers.net
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