SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 RS3 on Monday May 18 2020, @04:07PM (4 children)
For several reasons I won't write up my similar story, but the gist of it was that there were mistakes by EZ-PASS that didn't even make sense. It was a friend's EZ-PASS. He hired me to drive some people and him on a trip. I don't have, and won't have, an EZ-PASS account. It took several calls and patience and a rep. finally followed what I was saying, removed the fine and tolls, but then 6 months later it was back. Aforementioned friend is a really good guy, but a bit naive, and foolishly trusts "officials". He understood the situation and that it was EZ-PASS's fault, but he kept thinking he had to pay the fine.
The problem was 2-part- the transponder and rental license plate didn't match up in their database, and at least 1 time the system didn't properly communicate with the transponder. One of my gripes with their system is that you (the driver) have NO indication that the transponder is recognized. At some toll booths yes, but they have many readers where there is NO indicator at all.
It's a system built to make $ for EZ-PASS, full of potential failures, and always in favor of EZ-PASS taking your $. I don't know how to fix this badly broken system. Govt. and courts generally don't give a crap about a few people who get ripped off. To them, the system is working well enough. Lump it in with the traffic light cameras. USA was founded by people who were united. Everyone now is so scattered and divided, I doubt anything will be done to fix EZ-PASS. Maybe if a major news journalist got the story out to enough people.
But as I write I'm thinking a problem is one of the tenets of democracy is majority rule, so if the majority of people are happy with EZ-PASS, then the few who have problems are in the minority, and of course they're unhappy, and the heck with them.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @04:46PM (1 child)
Sorry to hear about your issue, too.
Let's just be clear here. This isn't just "about a few people." There are literally millions of people who have been ripped off by E-ZPass. See, for example, here [abc7ny.com], here [abc7ny.com], or here [phillyvoice.com], just for a few stories in just the first page of search hits.
The thing is, E-ZPass has figured out how to shake people down. Mostly, they overcharge by charging "cash rates" instead of what they are supposed to be charging, or adding on little $5 or $10 charges that frequent commuters are unlikely to notice. When they hit people with the whopper bills for hundreds of dollars, they'll negotiate down until they find a number people are willing to pay, rather than going through months of threats and non-responsive customer "service."
The thing is, it's illegal to blackmail people. It's illegal to send people threats by mail. And yet, E-ZPass gets away with threatening to revoke car registrations all the time when any court who actually looked at most of the errors (and likely deliberate profiteering schemes disguised as "errors"), any revocation of a registration because of an erroneous charge wouldn't stand up.
So, this isn't just a matter of regulation. If the justice system were operating realistically, the authorities behind E-ZPass should be charged with criminal conspiracy to blackmail, threaten, and likely commit fraud. Unless they can prove they've taken steps to drastically reduce error rates and create an actual customer service system that makes it easy to resolve complaints immediately, they should start putting leaders into prison.
I've never met anyone who was happy with E-ZPass. Have you? I mean, people will admit to convenience, and cashless tolling has helped to resolve some traffic problems. But every time I've told some part of my story, inevitable half of the other people I'm with have some other complaint about that time their transponder didn't work, or that time when they were charged for being in a state they've never been to, etc.
And I can't quite figure out how my $100 fine for each missed $5 toll could possibly be legal under the Excessive Fines Clause of the 8th Amendment. Oh wait, maybe it isn't [nj1015.com].
In that class action lawsuit, E-ZPass is claiming that it takes so much money to cover the cost of processing fines. Well, in my case, I wasted probably ~5 hours of their reps time between phone conversations and likely dealing with the documentation I sent them. If they had a simple system where I could upload documentation that a rep could review immediately with me, it probably would have taken 10 minutes to resolve the issue. So, the labor costs they complain about are complete BS -- they created an inefficient system so people would give up before getting their fines resolved.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday May 18 2020, @08:00PM
The more I engage in these discussions, the more frustrated I become that I'm not a wordsmith. You've raised excellent points and questions, but it can all turn into a bunch of philosophical questions and more discussions, partly hinging on diction, definitions, colloquialism, etc.
Define "happy".
How about this: content. Maybe people aren't happy, but so much of life is compromise and to most people EZ-Pass is "good enough". And what's their recourse? Like you said, most people don't have the time to wait on hold for hours to talk to someone who might not actually help. The call can get cut off. Etc. Overall, there's no clear path to rectifying these problems, and people decide their time is better spent elsewhere.
I blame it on lazy compromising government. Congress should be up in arms, holding all-night sessions until they fix problems like this. If it was up to me, a single improper fine should trigger a full-scale investigation and radical change in the way the system works. EZ-Pass should never have been allowed to distribute passive transponders that have NO indication of being read by the stationary system. The stationary systems should NEVER have been allowed to be installed with NO indication of a read. This is great for EZ-Pass- cheaper, and much more difficult for a driver to document.
If I ever use EZ-Pass again, I'll very carefully document every time and place I'm aware of a stationary reader system, antennas, etc.
Yes, I know many people who are "content" with EZ-Pass. They've gotten a fine or two here or there, but they always say it's still worth it for the convenience.
How about this: get rid of tolls altogether.
More of my cynicism: EZ-Pass is yet another tracking system, and I think the govt. likes keeping tabs on everyone.
I wasn't aware that EZ-Pass could revoke a registration. That really has gone too far.
What REALLY burns me is that they have huge power over us, but we'd have difficulty winning a lawsuit over them, let alone press criminal charges. Lazy lazy lazy government.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @07:37PM (1 child)
Dude the first thing Washington did after the founding of the country (before the constitutional congress) was conscript a bunch of people to go put down the Whiskey Rebellion in Kentucky, because those upstarts should pay their 0.5 percent tax on their bartered hooch while the east coast corporate assholes get to pay a flat fee because it would be too much paperwork or cost for them to actually pay their 0.5 percent on every barrel of whiskey they produced.
America has always been the haves and the have nots. The difference was America for a long time had enemies without who unified those within, even those disparate groups fought a simmering cold war of class and ideological battles from the 1770s-80s through to the Civil War, Women's Suffrage, Civil Rights movement, Gay Rights/Feminist movements, and then to today, where external threats are only as important as mass media tells us and as often as not the targets are previously simmering groups within the country with which to be outraged rather than those without who previously would have been targetted to focus our collective ire.
Also don't forget because the Constitutional Congress the Confederation was constantly stabbing each other in the back with locally printed script, lousy exchange rates and in some cases runaway inflation. Not altogether different from what the Union is doing today, although the hucksters involved are far more consolidated and the debt is now everyone's to bear, rather than bickering over which state should carry which debts. (There is a lot to be learned from early American history that translates well to the events of the past decades.)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday May 19 2020, @06:16PM
I absolutely agree, and I'm super impressed with your knowledge. As a young-un I all but hated history. Now I'm fascinated with it. Of course, no K-12 system that I know of explains things the way you did. I remember the name "Whisky Rebellion" and that's about it. Well, the founders were a pretty scrappy bunch. So so much of life is perspective, right? You could very easily look at the "freedom fighters" as extreme treasonous criminals. I could babble on about what little I know, but the truth is, even for someone who knows much detail of early American history, it still matters whose side you're on. No question something had to change, but doesn't it always? When or where has there been a system of government where everyone is happy? Or at least content? If I had time this could be interesting, but just no time right now.
Are you a historian officially? Or do you teach history? Or poly-sci? Or??
Thanks for your post, btw.