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Hank Investigates: Incorrectly Charged for EZPass Tolls:
Cynthia's red four-door sits in her Concord driveway. Exactly where it's been for weeks.
[...] "We were following the governor's order and we were not leaving," Cynthia said.
So when Cynthia got her April EZ Pass bill she was baffled. It said her car went through tolls in New York, a COVID hot spot.
[...] She was billed for 60 different tolls with charges totaling more than 600 dollars.
"It said we were on the Bronx, Whitestone Bridge, the Throgs Neck Bridge, and the RFK Bridge in New York City.
I'd never been on those bridges," Cynthia said.
Not a chance her car was in New York. She says she spent hours on the phone with EZ Pass trying to get the errors fixed.
[...] What happened? We found Cynthia's toll trouble is because of the way Massachusetts issues license plates—and a glitch in the EZ Pass system.
The problem is Massachusetts, one of the 17 states connected in the system, uses the same numbers on different types of plates. For example, there could be Mass passenger 1234, but also commercial 1234, Cape and Island 1234, Red Sox, Purple Heart, and more.
When a special plate like that gets an electronic toll, cameras snap a photo of it, and then it’s looked up in the EZ Pass shared system so the car can be charged.
But we found those files do not provide “plate type” information! So if commercial 1234, for instance, goes through, passenger 1234 could get the bill.
How in the world did anyone thing that giving the same license plate number to multiple vehicles was a good idea?
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday May 18 2020, @09:10AM (1 child)
The whole place was designed to confuse automatic plate readers:
commercial [bing.net]
bus
Lots more here [google.com]
tl;dr: the automated plate readers need to be able to distinguish the words under, and beside the plate numbers and letters to work out the plate type, and even then, the state allows special characters within the plate numbers and letters... (do they allow emojis?)
Want to bet a State Trooper with a number that matches someone else's never gets a ticket or a bill? ("when in doubt, send to first private user with a matching/similar plate")
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Monday May 18 2020, @10:15AM
Back in 2002 everybody in the Netherlands was forced to buy new licence plates. There was a make believe story that this would combat theft. But the font [dafont.com] was highly optimized for automatic plate recognition, with open 'O's, 'P's etc. Theft stayed the same, but issuing of fines was automated. We had only a few toll roads back then, currently we only have 4 toll tunnels.