Driving in France Automated toll payment

There was a thread last year at
https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/france/paying-for-french-autoroutes
which addressed a similar issue.

I'm not convinced that for you having a transponder won't be more trouble than the value you might receive. It sounds like the only autoroute driving will be the run to Paris? If you are going village to village you may well spend most of your time on "N" and "D" roads, and not on the Autoroutes much at all.

Be sure to read my answer on that other thread so you see the additional costs involved. If you don't intend to drive on several trips to France with plenty of visits to Autoroute toll plazas it may not work for you.

What are you doing with the car in Paris? You aren't planning on driving or parking it are you?

We rented a car in Caen a few years ago, drove around Normandy, to Amboise and then Nimes where we dropped the car. For the times we were on toll roads, it was very easy just to use Euros to pay the fee. We generally stopped at concession places along the way and always had enough cash. For probably more than half of our trip we were not on toll roads.

Even in the U.S. the rental car companies charge a bunch for using ezpass -- not worth it, to my way of thinking. Just keep lots of €5 bills and €2 coins in the car.

Thank you everyone,
For this matter, cost is not an issue but trying to drive through the tolls faster since we are going in August and supposedly autoroutes have huge queues of cars paying with cash or credit cards. We could use the roads with no tolls, but we would like to get from point A to B faster. As I mentioned in my post, we are American so as far as I know, based on the posts I have read, we need to have a French or UK bank accounts to be able to purchase either SANEK or Liber-T and we do not have one. Going back to my original questions, once in France, Where do we purchase one,
We will arrive to the Marseilles airport and will drive to Arles from there.
Thanks again

We were in France last Fall and were NOT able to get our credit cards to work in the autoroute toll booths: very frustrating! We made sure to have the chip card and a PIN handy if necessary, but that didn't help. We're going back again in June and will plan on having cash handy for the booths.

We were told by local friends there that the passes were not worth it for a couple week's visit, but we were also using a lot of non-autoroutes during our adventures.

As to toll machines, I reported earlier (https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/france/credit-cards-at-toll-booths-on-autoroutes) that my card worked every time in the Savoie, Ain and Burgundy, but not later on with a different card in the Rhone.