Why ‘stop’ there?
All stop/give way signs should be removed and those priority chicanes
that many french villages have installed to slow traffic.
No more deceleration and excelleration fuel waste then!!
Perhaps the aforementioned chicanes actually counter and fuel waste as many are beautifully planted with foliage that consumes the deadly fumes.
A touch of grumpy old man syndrome perhaps?
Currently personally causing fuel wasting deceleration and acceleration as we are having a few days trundling along the roads of france in our camping car while others who think we are hogging the road do their best to accelerate past us only to find another camping car around the next corner!
Remember the hare and the tortoise.
Not at all, obviously thought of improvements. You are stretching the topic to daft levels saying remove all traffic calming etc. I bet there isnt a car that accelerates using less than 10 miles per gallon away from a peage. All so pointless.
Now you’ve gone and spoilt it for me, I have been watching this thread with only slight interest as I rarely use peages but my eyes lit up at @JohnBoy’s intervention because chicanes and speed bumps are my special moan. Why on earth do you think the way you do about peage barriers but dismiss objections to chicanes and speed bumps with a comment like that? 
Its not dismissing chicanes and speed bumps more of the way they were used to somehow add weight to the topic. Call it a thread drift if you will. I agree with you they are a nuisance but also I see around us how some people really do hammer through small villages.
Seeing how the peage grand prix played out yesterday and how much better the crossings without them aid traffic flow was the conversation point. I appreciate peoples points of view even if I dont agree with them, the point that a camera can record so much at any speed and yet we have rapid deceleration and then acceleration and whether that causes accidents I dont know but there is a fair bit of lane weaving going on depending on how many are queueing event in the run up to the 30 kph lanes.
Speed bumps I dislike, and they are rarely maintained adequately, but I have no objection to chicanes and the way they slow the speeders down.
But I also like the (what I think of as the Spanish) method: radar combined with traffic lights. If you speed, the light stops you.
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Thinking about it, I can’t remember ever seeing an accident at a paeage even the big ones, I have seen cars getting hit by the barrier due to malfunction, but never any accidents due to weaving or due to vying for a booth.
The French must be more diseplined.
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Of course it is, did you think anything else. The latest Mesto cameras (the big portacabin style on a pole) take a photo whether you are speeding or not. They call it big brother is watching you. You are photgrahed at the port leaving the boat or the train. There was a program on TF1 sometime ago where the Gendarmerie were hunting some bad guys, they used the mesto cameras to track them and caught them at the toll gate.
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But they are a good way to check the suspension on the cheap.
And your fillings 
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Many years ago, there was a report about the logged times at the peages showing how drivers were/must have been breaking the speed limits.
OH found it an excellent reason to spend longer over lunch at a nice eatery en route… just in case he’d been a little too speedy… and then long, slow lunches became the norm !!
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Yes BIL got pinched doing far too higher speed than he should have. Again cameras for average speed manage this without barriers.
Peages are a source of income… that’s clearly understood… and the barriers mark the start and finish of each section.
I have known vehicles turn around on discovering they’re about to enter a paying section (by mistake). 
Yes, I know it’s not allowed, but as all vehicles were going slow, expecting to stop, it was done without accident or injury and thankfully it was just a few metres off a “normal” roundabout… so all was well …
Phew… there were some startled motorists that day… they went on around the roundabout … while all us oldies reversed/turned and finally went down our correct route (non-peage) 
I drove on a newer section of Autoroute a month or so ago where there were no toll booths. The cameras recorded my number plate and I went on line to pay. Can’t remember exactly where it was around St Etienne area I think.
Edit - it was on the A79
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Surely that is the problem, not the barriers as such, you should not be doing it but lifting off, as the reducing speed limit signs insist you do, to drift slowly into the channel.
Personally, as someone who always has to stop to pay, the last thing I want is someone in the adjoining lane flashing through at speed.
When I see the speed reduction sign i take my foot of the pedal or de-activate the cruise control and when i arrive at the channel I am normally doing around 20 kliks so a light tap on the stopping pedal normally slows me down so the camera can react. If you have to do a rapid deceleration then you are going to fast anyhow.
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There we have the question. If no barriers and a more realistic speed allowed bearing mind peoe are usually travelling at 110-130kph. Obviously there would be segregation from those stopping to collect a ticket or pay.
Not me, I do as you do but others diving in front to get ahead but again could be done away with.
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I see the idiots every week on my weekly jaunt to paris, doesnt bother me as I know they are about and invarialbly I get through before them anyway with out wasting brakes or go juice.
2013 ish… at the border (IIRcorrectly) , one had to enter one’s bank card, allow the cameras to photograph the number plate… etc etc…
Then we drove wherever we wished and never thought any more about it.
but every time we were on their peages/pay areas/whatever… the bank account was to be automatically zapped. As I recall there weren’t barriers as such (certainly not noticeable/memorable)
As it happens, in those days their equipment didn’t recognize French classic-immatriculations… hurrah… didn’t cost us, or our pals, anything for the whole 3 weeks…
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makes an interesting read…
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