Will motorists adjust to the Atlantic Beach Bridge toll hikes?

When the Nassau County Bridge Authority raised its tolls on the Atlantic Beach Bridge at the beginning of the year, Robert Sanchez, a Long Beach resident and an Uber driver, changed his daily routine.

Sanchez, who has a degree in economics from Binghamton University, has always loved driving, and he applied to Uber in 2014 to see if it might be the career for him.

“Nobody knew about Uber when I started, so you really couldn’t do any business on Long Island,” he recalled. “You had to really commute into Manhattan if you wanted to get any business.”

For Sanchez, that meant using the Atlantic Beach Bridge. “The bridge is really the fastest way if you were starting off in the morning,” he said.

In January, tolls on the bridge rose from $2 to $3 for passenger vehicles, and from as low as $4 to as high as $16 for trucks. The cost of the popular annual decals issued by the Nassau County Bridge Authority increased from $130 to $199 for vehicles registered in Nassau County, and from $175 to $349 for those registered elsewhere.

On a typical day before the increases went into effect, Sanchez picked up riders in Long Beach, or across the bridge in Far Rockaway or other parts of Queens, and drove them into Manhattan. At the end of his shift, he came back across the bridge to get home.

Now, when the day starts for him and he checks his Uber app in his apartment, he prioritizes Long Beach Uber riders and is less inclined to respond to those on the other side of the bridge. Over the course of his day, if he is headed to or from Manhattan, he goes the long way, taking Long Beach Road and the Southern State and Belt Parkways in order to avoid the bridge, and the higher tolls.

Sanchez, who cannot purchase a yearly decal because his Toyota Camry is listed as a commercial vehicle, now buys a 20-trip card — whose prices jumped from $15 to $30 at the beginning of the year — every two to three months.

“I changed my driving habits completely,” he said. “I usually got the card every three to four weeks and spent $15 roughly a month.”

Along with the toll increases, the bridge authority also announced the implementation in mid-2023 of the E-ZPass system on the Atlantic Beach span.

Last month, authority board commissioners told the Herald they had reached an agreement with TRMI Systems Integration, a service that specializes in electronic toll systems, to get E-ZPass up and running.

Sanchez doesn’t approve of E-ZPass for the local bridge, because of the jobs that will be lost. “Eventually they’ll get rid of the toll operators,” he said. “… The bridge is one of the few bridges that have live people.”

It remains to be seen whether the toll hikes will impact beach-bound traffic through the Five Towns, or nearby businesses on either side of the bridge, during the peak summer months. One employee at Atlantic Beach Café Deli, who declined to give his name, said that, so far, business had not suffered.

“Some people prefer to come through Oceanside instead of taking the bridge,” he said.

“But some other people don’t mind and just pay to pass by, but it might affect people who won’t come in if the toll is so high.”

In February, two petitions were created on Change.org, calling on the bridge authority to rescind the toll increases and to make its financial statements public. More than 2,000 people have signed them.

The Herald reached out to the bridge authority for comment, but had not received a response as of press time.

One signee commented that the new tolls would prevent her from going to restaurants in Atlantic Beach. “I like to go to the restaurants over there like Beginnings,” Alian Spielman wrote, but “at that price, I’m not going to go anywhere.”

Have an opinion on the Atlantic Beach Bridge toll increases? Send a letter to jbessen@liherald.com.