Love, come Saturday, will be a little costlier for Rose Lauver.
She drives from Suffolk to see her boyfriend in Norfolk about three times a month. That takes her through the Midtown Tunnel, which beginning in five days will be tolled, as will the nearby Downtown Tunnel.
Lauver, 70, will have little recourse but to pay, and while that thought angers her - "I think it sucks," she said - she has used it to get a laugh out of her man.
"I told him on the phone a while ago, 'You better pay me for coming through this tunnel,' " she said.
For others, the implications are weightier. People and businesses across the region are figuring the cost of tolls over months and years and reshaping their lives and budgets in response.
Conner DuRose plans to change universities. Kyle Ranallo quit a job he liked in Chesapeake. A law firm in Portsmouth will shell out $13,000 to reimburse employees to keep them from leaving, and that's for only the first year of tolls.
The fees will pay to build a second tube for the Midtown Tunnel, doubling its capacity, and to make other improvements, including a freeway connection to Interstate 264. Supporters of the project say it will provide more reliable, free-flowing movement. Critics say the tolls, set to last until 2070, will cripple commerce, particularly in Portsmouth, and raise barriers anew in a region already segmented by water.
South Hampton Roads has a population of about 1.1 million, and roughly one in three people and one in five jobs reside west of the Elizabeth River, according to data from the region's Transportation Planning Organization.
The tunnels carry a combined 125,000 vehicles daily across that natural boundary, connecting people and commerce from Suffolk, Portsmouth and Chesapeake's Western Branch with Norfolk, Virginia Beach and the rest of Chesapeake. The crossings were tolled once before but haven't been since the late 1980s, making them the first roads in Virginia to regain tolls after having been free.
Beginning Saturday, the nearest free alternatives for some drivers will be 12 miles away by interstate.
Brandon Barnes is among the thousands who live on one side and work on the other. He commutes from Western Branch to Norfolk Naval Station through the Downtown Tunnel. To limit his tunnel use, he plans to take the toll-free High-Rise Bridge on his way home. That will add about 8 miles to his commute.
Barnes said he might pursue a transfer to Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth to avoid the fees altogether for work. He will try to not use the tunnels in his free time, either, meaning fewer trips to MacArthur Center in Norfolk.
Meanwhile, Barnes' girlfriend told him the tolls might be the last straw in determining whether her daughter continues at The Governor's School for the Arts in Norfolk.
"It's kind of one of those things that tipped the scale," he said.
Similarly, DuRose, a freshman at Old Dominion University who commutes from Portsmouth, said the tolls were "not the biggest reason but most definitely a factor" in his likely decision to attend a different school next year.
He scheduled his spring semester at ODU with the tolls at the top of his mind. He tried to cluster his courses so he wouldn't have large gaps between them, and took one fewer class as a result.
Ranallo lives in Norfolk's Ghent neighborhood and works seven days a week for the Taylor Bend Family YMCA in Western Branch. Friday will be his last day because of the tolls.
"I'm leaving a job that I really enjoyed and really loved as far as dealing with people and management," he said, "to basically not having any kind of relationship with anybody on the other side of the tunnel."
Ranallo figured the tolls as originally planned - $1.84 during peak travel times - would have cost him about $1,500 a year. That estimate came down when Gov. Terry McAuliffe struck a deal with the tunnels' private tolling operator that reduced the fees to $1 during peak times, in exchange for an $82.5 million contribution from the state.
The fees are set to rise by 25 cents a year until the new tunnel opens in 2016, at which point they will revert to their original amounts - $1.59 off-peak and $1.84 peak for most cars. From that point forward, Elizabeth River Crossings, the private operator, can raise them by at least 3.5 percent a year.
Ranallo said the temporarily reduced toll still would have been too great of a burden to stay at the Y. He considers himself fortunate to have found work with a former employer in Norfolk, Changes City Spa.
The owner there, Norma Dorey, has made her own pre-emptive strike. She plans to offer toll rebates to clients of the spa and her other two businesses, Jake's Place and Changes Hairstyling. Dorey doesn't know how much that will cost her, but she figures losing clients would hurt more.
"We've been hit really hard in this area from sequestration, the government shutdown, Obamacare - now we got the tolls," she said.
The Moody Law Firm in Portsmouth will be covering the tolls for 22 employees who commute through the tunnels. Assuming that number doesn't change, the expense will rise quickly, to about $23,000 a year in 2017.
"If we did not do this we would have lost good individuals as soon as jobs became available across the water," said Michael T. Sciancalepore, the firm's administrator and CFO.
Others will be looking for ways to share the expense or pay for public transit instead.
A van pooling company called vRide has about 15 new commuter groups that have enrolled in the past month or are expected to join in Hampton Roads, said Chris Fenderson, a business development executive with the company. That's about a 50 percent increase over the prior number of van pools that vRide had running within the region, he said.
Wylene Bradford, 59, lives in Portsmouth and works across the river at MacArthur Center in Norfolk. Before the toll reduction was announced, she said she would begin riding the bus to work rather than driving, once the tolls started.
"And try to shop in Portsmouth," she said.
In the long run, the experience of tolls elsewhere suggests the fees here could contribute to a 3 to 5 percent decline over a decade in the value of commercial properties and homes that are closely tied to the tunnels, said ODU economist James Koch.
His research concluded that Portsmouth will bear a disproportionate burden compared with the rest of Hampton Roads, but even there, he predicted, the tolls will have a "spotty and mixed kind of effect."
Dave Forster, 757-222-5005, dave.forster@pilotonline.com