Golden Ears Bridge - Tolls

Tolls

The new bridge uses an electronic tolling system to track vehicles that cross to recover construction costs. Tolls have not been used in the Lower Mainland since the 1960s when they were removed from all bridges. This is also the first electronic toll bridge in Western Canada.

Drivers have the option of opening a tolling account. This includes an electronic tolling device, or transponder, to be mounted on the vehicle's windshield. It detects usage of the bridge, allowing toll charges to be automatically billed to the driver's account, streamlining the tolling process.

Vehicles without an electronic tolling device have their license plates identified through an automated video recognition system, and will be billed accordingly. Drivers of such vehicles also have the option to pay for their trip in advance by establishing a temporary account with a credit card, and pay a lower toll rate than if they did not establish such an account. The video recognition system costs more for Translink to run over the long term because it requires that humans identify plates that the system is misreading and because of the need to respond to misreads in which people are wrongly billed.

There have been numerous media stories of fraud and people being charged by the automated system for crossing the bridge when they never had done so, including one story in which a local resident was charged for crossing the bridge more than 90 times, when he had never driven across it at all.