When players of Cities: Skylines reach the Boom Town milestone, they get access to a pair of toll booths. Then at the Big Town milestone they unlock the large toll booths, plus a special policy in the city planning tab.
Toll booths are a special way of making money in Cities: Skylines. The extra cash isn't much compared to property tax income, but the booths can at least pay for themselves and then some. However, players should keep in mind how much a toll booth can slow down traffic, and how much trouble this can cause in the wrong location.
Placing a Toll Booth
Players can find their unlocked toll booths in the last tab of the road construction menu. However, unlike normal road types, players don't get an option that lets them upgrade roads to toll-booth roads. This means they have to remove existing roads and replace them.
The trickiest part of placing a toll booth is getting it in the right orientation, especially since the trick for flipping road directions doesn't work on toll booths. Instead, players will need to rotate the toll booth before placing it, and players can do this by pressing the rotate button (the default on PC is the right mouse button) or by pressing and holding the rotate button while moving the toll booth. This should spin the booth around and allow players to have two separate booths lined up next to each other along a highway.
Toll Booth Tricks
- Toll booths always slow traffic down, even when players activate the Automated Toll policy that lets vehicles pass through without stopping. Still, an automated highway toll booth has just enough lanes to keep traffic from coming to a complete halt.
- A two-way large toll booth may seem like a good idea for a highway since the maintenance cost is lower than two small one-way toll booths, but the merging traffic on both sides will slow things down even further and cause traffic jams.
- Players can adjust the ticket price at a toll booth from between 0.10 and 2.00, with large vehicles always paying double. There is no universal ticket price, so each booth has to be adjusted manually.
- Toll booths aren't very profitable unless they handle a high volume of vehicles with the ticket price set to max. Don't expect to use them as a way to give property owners a tax break.
- Instead of using a toll booth to make money, players may want to use them to reroute traffic. Toll roads are less appealing to the driver AI, especially when players set the toll high, and so they'll often look for routes around the tolls even if those routes are longer.
Cities: Skylines is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.