Toll Booth: The Three-Second Pause That Vanished on the Highway

"Social collective memory and history are different." — Chen Zixuan, 2015¹

30-second overview: Taiwan's national highway toll stations operated for thirty-nine years (1974-2013), and what most people remember is just the three seconds of reaching out to receive numbered tickets. But that gesture itself later became a measuring stick. On the very day the Taishan station opened in 1974, it was announced that all toll collectors would be female—four years earlier than the "policy shift after the 1978 Zhongzheng Bridge scandal" that later became popular lore. What decided toll collection was the Executive Yuan's 1,134th cabinet meeting, and a bold financial gamble to build toll roads when the nationwide car ownership rate was under 1%, which had no direct causal relationship with the oil crisis that erupted the same year. In 1985, the official precise measurement of passing-through time was set at 3.7 seconds; in 2013, at dawn, the entire system was compressed to zero, resulting in 947 toll collectors reaching a confidential settlement after an eleven-year struggle spanning two political parties. Today, three ticket booths remain alongside the highway: Taishan, Dajia, and Tianliu—"worth seeing, but not worth lingering."

The Three Seconds of Handing Over the Toll Ticket

On the noon of July 30, 1974, the Zhongshan Expressway opened to traffic between Sanzhong and Zhongli, and the Taishan Toll Station was also inaugurated on the same day, becoming the first highway toll station in Taiwan². On the opening day, the minimum fare was NT$15 per trip for small vehicles, and within two days, over 600 people came to apply for toll collector positions³.

For the next thirty-nine years after that, all drivers across Taiwan's highways went through the same action: slowing down, extending their right hand, handing the toll ticket to the toll collector, and within less than three seconds of fingertip contact, the car would drive away. After the full implementation of toll ticket-exclusive lanes on December 1, 1985, the authorities precisely measured this action as "the average time for each vehicle to pay the toll using a ticket was reduced to approximately 3.7 seconds"⁴.

The toll tickets themselves were paper, with 10 tickets per book. Small vehicles cost NT$400, large passenger and freight vehicles NT$500, and articulated trucks NT$650. They could be purchased at service areas, post offices, and gas stations. In 1983, a bulk discount was added—100 tickets per book at 95% of the original price, sold to freight operators⁵. As for the romantic-sounding term "the 'touch hands' era," it originated in 2023 when someone shared old photos of toll stations on a Facebook group, and netizens commented, "Back then, whenever my husband touched a female toll collector's hand, I was super jealous." The media later compiled and named it retrospectively. It was not a term used by the toll collectors themselves, nor an official or common designation during the toll station's operation, and it came into being a full ten years after the events themselves⁶.

Compared to "the 'touch hands' era," the toll collectors themselves remembered the scenes more directly. Former Taishan Toll Station toll collector Huang Yansheng, in an interview at a 2019 retrospective exhibition, said that inside the small toll booth, there was a mix of gasoline smell, dust, and exhaust fumes, and they had to stand for 8 hours a day. During his shift, "every 5 seconds, they had to greet a passerby," and the actions were "repeatedly handing out tickets, making change, and checking for counterfeit money and tickets." Taishan Toll Station had 22 toll booths lined up in a long row, and "between booths 2 to 5, there was a staircase connecting to an underground passage"⁷.

——The three seconds it took to hand over the toll ticket, and the three seconds of standing continuously for 8 hours in the toll booth, are two sides of the same moment. This moment is worth looking back on and clarifying: whose hand it was, how long it could pause, and how many seconds it took to hand over—all of these were precisely decided by someone behind the scenes.

All Female Hires: A Policy, Two Wrongly Linked Years

A commonly misremembered version is that in 1978, the Zhongzheng Bridge toll station in Taipei had a forged payment certificate scandal, leading the government to decide that all future highway toll collectors would be female. This causal link sounds plausible (women are more meticulous, less prone to corruption), so it has been passed down for a long time. But when you look at the timeline, the dates don’t add up.

The June 15, 1974 edition of the United Daily News carried a headline that still sounds a bit shocking today: “Taishan Station on the Highway Hires Female Toll Collectors.” The report quoted the then-director of the Ministry of Transportation’s Highway Bureau, Hu Meichung, who said women are “more meticulous,” “more flexible with computer equipment,” and mentioned that in the past, when the Provincial Highway Bureau was run by men, “embezzlement by toll collectors was rampant.” As a result, Taishan Station “broke with tradition” and decided to “hire all female toll collectors”⁸. In other words, the policy of hiring all females was announced when Taishan Station opened in July 1974, four years earlier than the 1978 Zhongzheng Bridge scandal.

Moreover, Zhongzheng Bridge is not part of the highway system. It is City Road 111, spanning the Xindian River and connecting Taipei City’s Zhongzheng District and New Taipei City’s Yonghe District. Administratively, it falls under the Taipei City Government’s Public Works Department / New Taipei City Government, not the Ministry of Transportation’s Highway Bureau. The direct consequence of the 1978 scandal was “replacing all toll collectors at Zhongzheng Bridge,” installing computer anti-fraud systems, and “removing the bridge tolls in advance.” This urban connector bridge was shut down by its own internal corruption case, which had no direct relation to the female recruitment policy that was already running four years earlier on the highway system⁹. The official records of the Highway Bureau from 1974 to 1996 do not mention “1978,” “Zhongzheng Bridge,” “scandal,” or “gender policy shift”⁴.

Furthermore, the phrase “all female” is not entirely accurate. As mentioned earlier, Huang Yansheng is male and worked at the Taishan toll station, which announced the all-female recruitment in 1974, for 8 years⁷. This indicates that regardless of the original intent of the policy, the “founding station” was not entirely female throughout its 39 years of operation. Additionally, the quote from the director citing “male toll collectors embezzling” as the basis for the policy is only from the 1974 report, with no further primary documents to verify. Even when writing, some room for doubt should be retained. What is certain is that the causal direction has been wrong for a long time: a recruitment policy decided in 1974 cannot be the “result” of a scandal that occurred four years later.

Huang Yansheng’s recollection of the ticket booth daily routine is more precise than the widely exaggerated version. Officially, the toll station is divided into day shift, night shift, and late-night shift, with 8-hour rotations, 30-minute breaks every 2 hours, and about 6.5 hours of actual duty in the booth¹⁰. He said in an interview that although the job was hard, “during holidays or cold winter nights, when truck drivers give warm drinks, it makes people feel warm”⁷.

—The policy decided whether this hand should extend or not, and also decided how often this hand should extend every 5 seconds, how long each time, and how many years.

Fifteen Yuan: A Gamble on an Entire Highway

Taiwan was not collecting road fees for the first time. On January 29, 1953, the day the Xiluo Bridge opened, "the bridge had a toll station," and all passing cars, buses, military vehicles, police cars, and various trains had to pay an "engineering benefit fee" to repay U.S. aid loans and strengthen road construction. This continued until 1977¹¹. Twenty years later, the highway itself took this same approach, but with greater scale and ambition.

The process of the highway taking this step is well documented by official records. The Ministry of Transportation commissioned the American consulting firm Dewhurst International to produce the "Feasibility Study Report for the North-South Expressway," which initially recommended that the road be free of charge. However, the government considered that "this highway project runs parallel to the existing provincial Western Trunk Line, and if it were free, it would attract a massive influx of traffic." Additionally, since the early stages of expressway construction relied on borrowing, "both construction and maintenance require significant funding." To achieve financial self-sufficiency, the Executive Yuan resolved in its 1,134th meeting to adopt the "user-pays principle" and designate the North-South Expressway as a toll road¹².

Interestingly, the original decision text does not mention the "oil crisis" at all. The decision logic had only two points: preventing traffic imbalance caused by parallel provincial highways, and the need for financial self-sufficiency due to debt-financed construction. Moreover, the timeline does not align. The Highway Bureau was established on June 8, 1970, broke ground on August 14, 1971, and began collecting fees at Taishan Station for the Taichung to Zhongli section in July 1974¹³. The first global oil crisis erupted in October 1973, three years after the Highway Bureau's establishment, two years after construction began, and even later than the toll decision. The commonly cited simplified narrative that "the 1970s oil crisis drove the toll policy" does not hold up under the official first-hand account. A more reasonable role for the oil crisis was as a background factor in Chiang Ching-kuo's subsequent (November 1973) announcement to expand the Ten Major Construction Projects, not as the origin of the toll station policy itself.

It is worth pausing to consider that at the time this decision was made, Taiwan's car ownership rate was still below 1%. The government had borrowed a large sum of money with national effort to build a highway that most people could not yet drive on, intending to repay the debt through future road users. On opening day, small cars paid 15 yuan per trip, while large passenger and freight trucks had different rates. This was betting the fate of an entire road on a prediction that "the age of driving would eventually arrive." In hindsight, this bet paid off, but for those who made the decision in 1970, they were gambling on a future they could not see—forty years ahead.

The moment a highway user first rolled down their window and handed over 15 yuan was the first pause this road set for itself, and the first installment payment of this grand gamble.

3.7 Seconds, and the Lawsuit Behind the ETC Project

If the three seconds that began when toll stations opened in 1974 were a vague everyday impression, then from 1978 onward, those three seconds officially entered an era of scientific management and steadily shrinking duration. On the surface, this history seems like nothing more than "efficiency getting better and better," but tracing it further reveals cracks in the progress narrative itself.

In 1978, small vehicle lanes without change were set up across the line. On December 1, 1985, return ticket lanes were fully implemented. The official chronicle recorded it clearly: "The average time for each vehicle using a return ticket to pay at a toll station was shortened to approximately 3.7 seconds"⁴. 3.7 seconds—this is the most famous number on this highway, and likely the only daily action in all of Taiwan measured precisely to one decimal place by the state. It gave the initially fuzzy "touch-and-go" impression a tangible measurement result: a scientifically managed, precisely compressed 3.7-second number.

The initial direction was to shorten the pause. On February 10, 1995, manually operated electronic toll collection (ETC) lanes were launched, with manual and electronic systems running in parallel⁴. On February 10, 2006, the DSRC on-board ETC system went live—fifteen days later, the story developed a crack. On February 25, 2006, Taipei High Administrative Court ruled to revoke the Directorate General of Highways' designation of Far Eastern Union as the "most preferred applicant" for the ETC project, citing reasons including Far Eastern's phased payment plan and the fact that the Directorate had not discussed on-board unit prices and modification fees during the contract negotiations¹⁴. The revocation ruling came 15 days after the ETC system had actually gone live, but the government promptly allowed Far Eastern to continue operations. When the second-stage tender was relaunched the following year, Far Eastern won the bid again. At the same time, Song Naiyu, the chief of staff to Minister of Transportation Lin Ling-san, was found to have leaked the ETC evaluation committee member list to specific vendors in exchange for bribes. He was sentenced to 12 years in the first instance, with the Supreme Court upholding 11 years and deprivation of political rights for 8 years, a final ruling¹⁵. Lin Ling-san himself was not prosecuted due to insufficient evidence¹⁵.

Then, at 30 minutes past midnight on December 30, 2013, the system was compressed to zero all at once. Toll booths across Taiwan simultaneously shut down, switching to multi-lane free-flow distance-based charging. There was no longer a single physical toll station anywhere along the entire expressway where drivers had to stop and hand over a ticket¹⁶. From 3.7 seconds to 0 seconds—this is a path Taiwan completed while others were still walking slowly. Japan's Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway had an ETC usage rate of 98.7% as of November 2025, yet still expects to complete unmanned toll stations only in the spring of 2028, limited to a single metropolitan area network—15 years behind Taiwan's one-time nationwide conversion¹⁷.

—But wrapping all of this up into a "Taiwan leads Asia" achievement story doesn't entirely hold up either. Taiwanese media and corporate publications repeatedly mention Far Eastern Electronic's 2016 GRAA Global Road Achievement Award in the Intelligent Transportation category¹⁸, but the current public records on the International Road Federation (IRF) website only go back to 2020, with no 2016 list in sight. This doesn't necessarily mean the award was fake—it may simply be that past years were not archived—but according to the principle of downgrading any "first/earliest/only" claims, this achievement should be labeled as "reported by multiple sources" rather than stated as a direct assertion. Even the claim of being "the world's first fully electronic multi-lane free-flow toll collection system," when traced back to its earliest citation, originates from the Taiwan Ministry of Transportation's Directorate General of Highways in 2015, cited by English Wikipedia and international trade media, rather than being actively certified by any independent international standards organization¹⁹.

3.7 seconds, measured to one decimal place, compressed to zero. During the same period, a transportation minister's secretary served 11 years in prison, a system whose qualification had been revoked still went live, and a shiny trophy to this day cannot be found on the host's official list. This is the complete arc of the efficiency story—and also the two sides of this highway that it is willing and unwilling to tell.

947 People, and a Mediation Eleven Years Later

Standing on the street and listening, beyond this system there is another kind of pause entirely out of proportion — a human one.

At 12:30 a.m. on December 30, 2013, as all manual toll stations across Taiwan shut down simultaneously, the 947 toll collectors employed by the Directorate General of Highways were all laid off in one sweep. The last 132 employees in northern, central, and southern Taiwan collected the final manual toll ticket during their shift²⁰. Most of these 947 people were contract employees, with tenure ranging from 12 to 29 years, and nearly 80% were middle-aged women²¹. They were not covered by the Labor Standards Act's severance pay provisions, and their departure package was a gratuity-based scheme of "severance savings or severance pay, plus an additional or supplemental 7 months' salary"²⁰.

This layoff sparked an eleven-year protest movement. The demonstrators knelt every six steps on their march from the Ministry of Transportation to the Executive Yuan, went on a hunger strike for two hundred hours, and climbed onto the East Lake ETC toll gantry — painting their faces blue in a parade, the very color of the electronic sensing lights that replaced their jobs²².

In 2016, after standing outside the DPP headquarters for over thirty hours, they finally reached an agreement with the new government — only to see it scaled back. On December 19, 2019, the Taipei High Administrative Court ruled against them in the first instance. Sun Xiulan, chairperson of the Self-Help Association, choked up on the spot, saying, "I really can't accept this result," accusing the court of "trampling government integrity underfoot"²³.

They appealed to the Supreme Administrative Court, which remanded for retrial. Finally, on December 30, 2024 — exactly eleven years to the day from the layoff — a mediation settlement was reached, and on February 15, 2025, a banquet of twenty tables was held in Kaohsiung to celebrate the end of the protest²⁴. This complete eleven-year timeline has already been thoroughly documented in the sister article National Highway System. Readers can go straight there for the full account of the kneeling marches, the blue-face parades, and the climb onto the ETC gantry, as well as the analysis of "political promises being broken and whether that constitutes an administrative contract are two separate issues."

Sun Xiulan, chairperson of the Self-Help Association, said it more clearly than any outsider's summary: "Throwing away toll collectors after using them up — this is unfair and unreasonable treatment of workers."²⁵

Three seconds and eleven years — two kinds of pause drawn by the same system, entirely out of proportion.

Three Toll Booths Preserved

Looking at today's highway map, all toll stations have been demolished, with only three ticket booths specially retained: Taishan, Dajia, and Tianliao, representing the northern, central, and southern maintenance engineering offices respectively²⁶. This is a rare instance of the state voluntarily preserving buildings it has demolished itself.

Taishan Station was the earliest of all toll stations, and thus the only one originally built with an underground tunnel — because it was constructed first, the tunnel was added later as reinforcement. The later-built stations along Highway 3, however, had underground passages built into their design from the planning stage²⁷. The relic display room offers one tour per day, Monday through Friday, each accommodating ten to thirty people, and reservations must be made in advance. The underground passage stretches 180 meters, with "every door in the passage connecting to an escalator leading to the ticket booths" — an entire subterranean world where toll collectors once carried heavy bags of equipment up to one of the 22 ticket booths²⁸.

Dajia Station was only opened in 2003, belonging to Highway 3. The official description is extremely restrained: "The old site of the former Dajia Toll Station, located near the Dajia urban area, features architectural elements resembling temples."²⁹ Media reports often use architectural commentary such as "the shape of the three temple gates," "a deformed Sancha roof," and "red glazed bricks without glaze" to fill in the gaps left by official silence³⁰. Incidentally, the so-called "escape tunnel" mentioned in local folklore was actually a service corridor originally used by toll collectors and highway police. Starting in 2011, the Ministry of Transportation gradually closed approximately 40 similar service corridors across Taiwan, with violators subject to a fine of NT$3,600³⁰.

Tianliao Station represents the youngest architectural image among the three. Completed in December 1999, it was the first toll station to open along the southern section of Highway 3. The official explanation of its design concept is detailed: "Incorporating nearby Shoushan Mountain and the Moon World scenic area, the station adopts a mountain-shaped roof design. The white horizontal stripes beneath the roof are designed with a slight wave pattern, and the station nameplate features a pointed pentagonal shape."³¹ The preserved area includes not only the mountain-shaped roof but also "the spiral staircase for toll collectors to ascend and descend the ticket booths and the underground passage." However, at the very end of the same official text, an honest note was added: "Due to the unsuitability of highways for prolonged parking and lingering, the site is currently not being developed for tourism and leisure purposes."³¹

The state is willing to let buildings be memorialized, but has no intention of letting people actually approach them.

The three ticket booths are lined up along the highway: visible, but not meant for stopping. When driving past, that fleeting glimpse of a mountain-shaped roof or temple pagoda stirs something within you, yet remains elusive — they sit right beside the road, but the very logic of this road does not allow you to stop.

Further Reading

• National Highway System — Power and Speed Over Fifty Years of Taiwan's Highways, including the full account of the toll collectors' eleven-year struggle for an "unpublicizable settlement"
• Taiwan Transportation System — The overall transportation network from highways, high-speed rail, metro to local roads

Image Sources

References