What you need to know
- Toll pass prices have begun to appear widely on Google Maps for Android and iOS.
- The feature works by calculating the total toll price for an entire route.
- It is live in the U.S., India, Japan and Indonesia, with more countries set to follow suit soon.
While Google Maps has long allowed you to avoid toll gates, it has lacked a way to tell you how much toll fee you might have to pay in the first place. Google recently addressed this oversight by announcing a new Maps feature that will display estimated toll prices before you begin navigating, and it is now available in a few countries.
The search giant has announced that Maps now shows toll pass prices on many of the best Android phones and iPhones. Starting today, the feature is available for nearly 2,000 toll roads in the United States, India, Japan and Indonesia. Google says it will arrive in more territories soon.
This means if you use Maps to navigate in any of those countries, you should now see toll price estimates for your route before you start driving. It's a handy feature that will help you plan your trip ahead of time and avoid roads with hefty tolls.
"You’ll see the estimated toll price to your destination before you start navigating thanks to trusted information from local tolling authorities," Google said in a post on the Maps help page. "We look at factors like having a toll pass or not, what the day of the week it is, along with how much the toll is expected to cost at the specific time you’ll be crossing it."
You can also choose whether to display toll prices with or without a toll pass, as fees vary by country depending on the payment method you use.
However, as shown in the image above, the feature appears to only provide an estimate of the total toll price you may incur for an entire trip. As a result, you may have to guess how much you'll have to pay for a single toll road.
As before, Maps will display toll roads by default, with an option to hide them in the settings. Nonetheless, if you want to see toll roads while navigating, perhaps to shorten your trip, knowing how much toll fees you'll pay can be a lot less stressful.
