Mine is a zombie transponder. It resembles a fat slice of toast. I got this museum-worthy relic of our transition to a cashless economy shortly after President George W. Bush began his second term in office, and I’ve had it for nearly 20 years. It refuses to die.
It seems incredible, but there are more than a million of these antiquities out there in Orange County. Perhaps you have one, too? They cost some $15 to $30, run on last-century technology and still beep when gliding beneath the toll sensors, gently signaling a reduction in your bank balance when you use the 73 or the 241 Toll Roads, or when you hop on the 91 Express Lane to Riverside, or, delightedly, when you use the new 405 Express Lanes between O.C. and UCLA at the weekday witching hour of 6 p.m. (chortling as you blow past the red brake lights choking the freeway to your right and thinking, “This may be the best $7.15 I’ve ever spent”).
The batteries in these ancient transponders were expected to last just five or so years, but, well, here we are. They work by transmitting a radio signal to the sensors overhead. They are dinosaurs, on the way to extinction.
Both the Orange County Transportation Authority and The Toll Roads began rolling out wee stickers for the corner of your windshield — which don’t require batteries and don’t beep — about five years ago. The stickers are embedded with a microchip that’s linked to your account, and toll sensors silently read that microchip as you glide by.
The stickers cost almost nothing — about 40 cents each — and are free for account holders. (Yes, yes, we got these some years back, but sold the cars they were attached to and, um, only just removed those stickers from our account.)
We honestly didn’t expect to find the transponder thing quite so fascinating. But it turns out that Orange County has made transportation history on this front.
Whether you view toll roads as an abomination of the California zeitgeist (oh, how well we…
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