Exact Change

At midnight on March 27, an era ended. The last toll was taken on the Golden Gate Bridge. That doesn't mean that toll won't be paid, it just won't be taken. By humans. It would be fun to tell you that a group of trained elephants have been put in the place of those humans who have been taking and receiving correct and not-so-correct change for the past seventy-five years. The booths would not accommodate pachyderms, so this solution was thinking far too out of the box. Instead, the toll will now be electronically deleted from your bank account by an electrical pulse. It's hardly noticeable, and after the first dozen or so attempts, it will only give off the slightest twinge. In the nerves of the Bridge District employees who were displaced.
They were all offered new jobs, and some of them were taken. Driving buses and other tasks that have yet to be usurped by artificial intelligence. Some of them didn't. They walked away with a bitter taste in their mouths, not interested in the sixteen million dollars of expected savings, or the streamlining of traffic patterns that will no longer have to stop for this simple human interaction. They feel the same way McDonald's employees felt when they were all replaced by cyborgs in the early twenty-first century.
By way of confession, I will say that my family had switched to the electronic method for paying tolls some years back. It's faster. It's cheaper. And once you're used to that twenty to thirty volt surge that pours through your car as the "lasers" track your motor vehicle to its ultimate destination, it's hardly noticeable.
Except you have this crazy urge to visit your local McDonald's. Or maybe that's the metal plate the Bridge District insisted that I needed to have inserted in my skull.