Canter Bridge

Let’s face it, every minute counts. You don’t have extra ones waiting to be spend in queue at a toll booth with smarter drivers whizzing through at speed to the left of you.

So buy the iPass.

I live in Indianapolis. My regular business trips to Chicago have now been enhanced by my son taking up residence at university there. Enter the iPass. I had always thought you paid for the privilege of not hitting the brakes at Chicago’s innumerable toll booths. How wrong was that?

Here’s the real deal: You buy a transponder for $50 on-line at http://www.getipass.com, at a Jewel/Osco store, or at an iPass service facility at one of Chicago’s freeway ‘oases’. Buy going online or calling the toll-free number, you activate your transponder then you stick it to the right place on our windshield and take off.

Your fifty clams gets you forty dollars worth of preloaded tolls and you get the remaining ten back if you ever turn the thing in. You can link your account to a credit, debit, or bank account so that it automatically replenishes, meaning you don’t get dinged for flying through a toll booth when your account has run dry. I’m told that the iPass brand words in other states where the government has conceded toll collection to private firms. What’s more, other companies have worked out reciprocal deals in what promises to make tollbooth stops around the country a thing of the past.

You can, as I have, buy a transponder for more than one vehicle and link them to the same account.

What’s not to like about this?

Nuffin’.