Most will know that the french motorways/autoroutes have a plethora of peage toll booths to collect fees for use of those "A" roads - fair enough, that is one of their ways of funding their road construction and maintenance.
Now, those booths are increasingly switching over to un-manned, automated methods of collecting the tolls.
The payment can be made by means of an automated system whereby each vehicle drives slowly through the peage station and the fee is collected automatically, or via what appear to be pre-paid cards to be entered into the machines BUT the average foreign visitor will not have these two choices to hand.
Historically, I have paid cash but this option is rapidly disappearing as the un-manning of the booths continues which leaves me with just a debit/credit card to use in the machines; the downside of this is the bank charges back at home - you can pay what amounts to a very small fee to use a short section of autoroute and end up with fixed charges by your bank that raise that fee by well over 100%.
If travelling longer distances on the A roads, the charges still accumulate on your home bank account because use of each and every toll booth incurs another standing charge for foreign exchange services.

Somewhere in another thread is discussion of the pros and cons of using pre-paid foreign exchange (forex) cards whereby you can buy what amounts to credit that is placed on a card; does anyone know if these will work in the french toll machines?

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Dave