Paul Briley received a nasty surprise when he opened a recent letter from the California Department of Motor Vehicles.
His car registration is up for renewal in March. But that cost ($171) was dwarfed by the accumulated toll violations and fees racked up crossing the Golden Gate and other Bay Area bridges ($728).
“That’s a lot to be added onto someone’s registration,” Briley said.
If he doesn’t pay the full amount, his vehicle registration will expire, and he could be pulled over and receive yet another fine ($281). Six months after his tags go bad, law enforcement would have the right to impound his car.
“It’s cruel and unusual punishment,” Briley said.
It’s one that many Bay Area drivers will soon experience.
After lifting Covid-era pauses on the practice, regional toll officials began sending large batches of unpaid tolls and fines to the DMV in fall 2023 so the agency would place holds on drivers’ registrations to force them to pay up.
From November 2023 through October 2024, the Bay Area Toll Authority filed 6.1 million holds, according to data obtained by The Standard. The Golden Gate Bridge district, a separate agency, issued nearly 280,000 registration holds during that time.
Each of those holds represents an unpaid toll; the toll authority and DMV were not able to tell The Standard how many individual drivers were affected without an additional, lengthy, data analysis. A single vehicle can receive at most 75 holds, meaning that at least 82,000 drivers have likely been blocked from registering their cars due to toll debt.
Toll officials say the holds are an essential tool to bring in money at a time when revenues are down. But advocates have criticized the practice as overly punitive, saying it makes life harder for people already struggling to pay their bills.
Closing the shortfall
Toll debt was far less common before 2020, when Covid pressured the Bay Area Toll Authority to quickly transition away from in-person toll-takers to a fully automated system. With the human touch – and cash – gone, the number of motorists ignoring fees soared.
“I’m shocked,” said former Assemblymember Phil Ting when presented with the number of registration holds recently filed with the DMV. The findings led Ting, who spearheaded toll debt reform while in office, to wonder whether toll authorities were too hasty in transforming the payment system.
“It does beg the question: How smart was it to move away from toll takers and move toward automation?” Ting said.
In 2022 and 2023, facing criticism over massive fines issued to some toll-skipping drivers, the Bay Area Toll Authority implemented significant reforms. It lowered its per-toll fine maximum from $75 to $15, rolled out a one-time waiver of penalties, and created a payment plan for low-income drivers.
But bridge toll violations continued to climb, reaching 12.5 million in 2023, triple the 2019 total. The unpaid tolls, paired with reduced bridge traffic, left the agency more than $200 million behind its pre-Covid annual revenue projection. That forced the agency — which operates the Bay, Antioch, Benicia-Martinez, Carquinez, Dumbarton, Richmond, and San Mateo bridges — to borrow about $560 million since 2021 to fund its maintenance work.
To close the shortfall, the agency recently approved a series of toll increases that will raise the cost of bridge crossings from $8 today to $10.50 in 2030. That increase would be even steeper if it weren’t for the registration holds, which recover about $26 million in outstanding tolls each year, according to Bay Area Toll Authority officials.
“It’s a blunt tool, but it is a really important tool,” said Rebecca Long, a spokesperson for the agency. “There’s a significant number of people who without [the DMV registration hold] won’t pay up.” She added that the toll authority’s interest “simply is collecting the tolls — which are a fee for all users of these state facilities. It is not to be punitive.”
Margaret Abe-Koga, vice chair of the Bay Area Toll Authority Oversight Committee, said the agency is “being very mindful, diligent, about finding ways to make transportation more equitable and accessible.” However, the many people cruising past tolls without paying are affecting the ability to maintain the bridges.
“If everybody paid their tolls, then perhaps we wouldn’t have to be having [price] increases,” she said.
No car, no job
Justin Herring turned down a job interview because of a registration hold on his vehicle. The gig required him to drive, and with the uncertainty of unpaid fines hanging over his head, he had to walk away.
After clawing his way out of homelessness, the 42-year-old is trying to find a job to keep cash flowing while he attends community college. There’s simply not enough time in the day to travel between classes and job interviews on public transit.
“I need my vehicle to try to find work,” Herring said.
This type of knock-on consequence plays out for many economically disadvantaged people when toll authorities send their fines to the DMV, according to Nisha Kashyap, racial justice program director for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Suddenly losing access to a car “might mean that in the morning, you don’t have a way to get to work, or you don’t have a way to get your kids to school, or you miss a doctor appointment,” Kashyap said. “I think that when you make a blanket determination that you’re just going to place these holds for everyone that has unpaid [fines], then you really risk a regressive system that penalizes the folks that don’t have the ability to pay.”
Paying the toll on time is not always possible for people with low incomes, according to Rachel Hoerger, a Bay Area Legal Aid attorney who represents clients dealing with fines.
She said her clients are less likely than the general public to be able to set up a FasTrak account, sometimes because they don’t have a bank account. And if they have unstable housing, they may not receive toll invoices, which are automatically sent to the address at which the vehicle is registered with the DMV. Toll authorities are not legally allowed to send invoices by email, a spokesperson said.
Many of Hoerger’s clients want to pay their toll bill, she said, but when it arrives, they simply don’t have enough money, because “survival issues come first.”
That’s Herring’s situation. Paying one toll at a time when there was a person in the booth was manageable. But having the cost come as a lump sum is not.
“I just don’t always have the money when they send the bill,” he said. “I don’t have hardly any money, between rent and groceries.”
After racking up a hefty toll bill in 2021, Briley was among activists who successfully pressured officials to reduce fines. Now, as he considers what to do about his latest debt, he feels the Bay Area Toll Authority hasn’t done enough to help drivers in need.
He bristles at the fact that only people with an income less than 200% of the federal poverty level, $31,300 for a single person, can use the toll payment plan. A full-time minimum-wage worker in San Francisco wouldn’t qualify.
Worse, to Briley, is the fact that even after the 2021 fine reduction, drivers can end up owing more than triple the cost of the original tolls if they rack up violations.
“If they’re going to [hold up your registration], there shouldn’t be any penalty; it should just be the bridge toll,” he said.
With authorities all-in on automated tolling and fees set to climb, there’s no clear resolution in sight for Briley, Herring, and others like them.
The toll authority and debtors are in a vicious circle, with officials raising fees to cover the cost of those who can’t, or won’t, pay. The two sides are at loggerheads, so it’s likely that thousands of drivers will continue racking up unexpected registration holds in the months to come.
Correction: This article originally contained an inaccurate per-toll fine maximum. It has been updated.