Halloween's long over and Christmas is just weeks away. Still, readers of last week's column inundated us with their own horror stories about passing through tollway booths in and out of Metro Manila.

There's no point in identifying anymore the tollway operators involved because the complaints we've gotten corresponded to all those using e-payment cards and radio frequency ID chips.

Technology is supposed to make people's lives easier, not harder, and the government may be given the benefit of the doubt when it mandated tollway operators to deploy cashless toll payment systems.

In theory, at least, the use of loadable, scanner-readable cards and RFID strips should make it a breeze to pass through tollways. The scanners would automatically read the card or chip, debit the corresponding toll fee, and then lift the boom so the vehicle can pass through.

I bet time-and-motion studies were cited in the adoption of cashless toll-payment systems that trumped the use of people at the booths, taking and handing back cash in toll and change.

Many people who manned those booths lost their jobs, rendered redundant by the machines.

However, the notion that all tollways can go purely cashless was immediately shot down when all sorts of problems cropped up during the rollout of the RFID and e-card payment systems.

And so, for every array of cashless booths, there'd be one or two devoted to cash payments, and woe unto those motorists who ventured into the cashless booths without RFID or e-cards or sufficient loads.

For a while, drivers without the RFID or e-payment cards were ticketed by tollway "police" for traffic obstruction at the cashless lanes.

Birth pains, the proponents of pure cashless toll payments said then, but exasperated motorists are now thinking that the cashless toll payment systems — at least as implemented in Metro Manila and nearby environs — may already be considered stillborn.

Many countries have cashless toll systems that have been running well for years and so the problems at the tollways may already correspond to faulty implementations.