Highway tolls
Toll Collector · Highway / Parking Toll Collector
“Highway tolls” (Toll Collector) was largely replaced by AI in 2020, after AI entered in 2014.
What this task is
Highway toll collectors staffed booths around the clock, issuing and collecting entry tickets, calculating fees by vehicle class and distance, taking cash or cards and raising the barrier for each car.
How AI replaces it
ETC on-board units and gantry readers identify vehicles and deduct fees automatically, rolling out at scale from 2014. China removed provincial-border toll stations at the end of 2019 and pushed ETC adoption, so manual collection largely ended by 2020.
What stays human
A few staff remain at toll plazas for vehicles without ETC, equipment faults and billing disputes; many former collectors moved into road patrol, monitoring centers or customer service hotlines.