In Delaware: Traffic Takes Its Toll

"Hi, how are ya? Sixty cents out of a ten. Here's your change."

From his 3-ft. by 6-ft., glass-walled, air-conditioned booth on the Washington-New York highway, Toll Collector William Piergalline has a smashing view of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, whose twin, gray-green spans arc gracefully over the Delaware River. But Piergalline, 54, a squat, salty, seven-year veteran of the Delaware River and Bay Authority, rarely notices his surroundings. Like the other toll collectors who, along with six automatic coin receptacles, handle the 16 lanes of the bridge's two Delaware-side toll plazas, he is much too busy raking in the cash. Sixty cents a car, $1.50 a bus, $2.50 for a big five-axle tractor trailer. So many tolls in swift, five-second transactions that on a peak day the bridge can bring in $85,000.

"The best way to Washington? Take the left lane and I-95 south."

Piergalline belongs to a large fraternity. The U.S. has 152 such toll bridges, tunnels or highways. They account for nearly 2.2 billion transactions a year. Particularly in Eastern states, motorists have grown accustomed to, if not content with, toll collectors. It is natural to assume that tolltakers are bored by what has to be the world's most monotonous job. Not so. Not on the Delaware Bridge anyway, if the long waiting list for jobs is any barometer. Shifts are regular: the same eight hours daily with two 15-minute beaks and a half-hour lunch five days a week. Salaries increase to $8.05 an hour within three years. All you have to do is count the axles on trucks slowing for the booth, make an appropriate "axle hit" on a twelve-key register, gather in the toll, make change and tally it up at shift's end. The routine can get tedious, true, but each day brings a full-dress human comedy rolling into the toll plazas. Besides, whatever hassles the traffic may bring are likely to last, at most, no more than seconds. "I used to be an accountant," says Piergalline contentedly, "and in an office I had to take the crap eight hours a day."

"Sure I can change a 20. We've got plenty of money."

Ten percent of those crossing Delaware Memorial are commuters. Some are bound for the plants that dot both sides of the river. Some are Jersey shoppers bound for Delaware, where these is no sales tax. Some faces, like those of the truckers who regularly haul furniture up the coast from the Carolinas or run Eastern Shore chickens to New York, tend to become familiar to the toll collectors. Supervisor Ronald Cantino, 34, kept seeing a Jersey girl who commuted to school near Wilmington. First he asked for her phone number, then for a date. Finally he married her. Now they have children.

The long-distance travelers, the business people, tourists, college students ask the strangest questions. Is this the Delaware Water Gap? (No, that scenic stretch where the river slices through Kittatinny Mountain is more than 100 miles upstream.) Am I in Washington, D.C.? What state is Delaware the capital of?

"Delaware Park race track? Ninety-Five south and the Stanton exit. And lots of luck."