520 Bridge Toll Begins Thursday. Are You Ready?

Are you really Good to Go for ? If you bought a transponder from a local store, you could be in for a surprise.

About four out of five drivers who commute across the bridge aren’t ready for the big change to come at 5 a.m. Thursday—the day that tolling starts.

Many motorists simply have not started Good to Go accounts, the automatic tolling system that the state will use instead of tollbooths on either end of the bridge.

But some motorists who purchased Good to Go transponders from local stores such as Costco, Safeway, Fred Meyer or QFC may think they are ready to go with Good to Go, but have not completed the final step: activating their accounts online or at a local customer service center, said Washington State Department of Transportation toll division director Craig Stone.

“Maybe you purchased a Good To Go pass in April and forgot about it or perhaps you received it as a gift,” Stone said in a news release. “If so, you still have another step: activate and install. Once your pass is active and in your vehicle, you can breathe easy.”

To activate your pass, which takes about 15 minutes, go to the Good to Go website.

Instead of collecting the tolls at a tollbooth, all tolls will be collected electronically, either through the Good to Go transponder passes that can be installed in the window of a car, or via a photo taken of a vehicle’s plate. The registered owner of the vehicle can either pay by mail after a bill is received for an additional $1.50 per trip, or vehicle owners can start an account that can be debited for an additional 25 cents a trip.

The toll price varies: $1.60 to $3.50 each way from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. weekdays, and $1.10 to $2.20 on weekends and some holidays.

The tolls are set to help pay for $1 billion of a . The entire project is scheduled to be finished by 2014.