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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @10:29PM
"How in the world did anyone thing that giving the same license plate number to multiple vehicles was a good idea?"
Because it predates them needing the plates to be machine-readable.
A MA cop tracking a "1234" commercial plate and a "1234" passenger plates can distinguish between them easily enough. One says "commercial" in little red letters down the bottom. The other doesn't. But this doesn't fit into how the machines just read the large numbers in the main body of the plate.
I also think the story is wrong about the Red Sox plates overlapping. These plates have, as part of the main body, "RS". It's written vertically, but I believe that's considered part of the plate's overall number for ALPR purposes. Similarly there are conservation plates with "RW" and probably others I don't know.
New Hampshire's system has different plate types but it's mostly distinguished by the initial letters in the plate's number. Nearly all of our plates are blank white with green lettering. Government plates start with "G". Farm trucks with "FA". School buses with "SB". Handicap plates are three digits followed by an "X" (and sometimes "Y", after they seem to have run out of "X" plates.) And so on. Regular passenger plates are a pure string of numbers, and have the Old Man in the Mountain in the background. Our conservation plates have a moose on them and the letters C, H, I, or P, appear in a string of otherwise numbers (L-CHIP being the state conservation agency that gets the money). Vanity plates are required to contain multiple letters so they can't collide with any of these.
Incidentally, the passenger plates are issued sequentially so you can roughly tell when a plate was issued. We're around 45x xxxx right now. Five years ago 37x xxxx (my own car). A six-digit plate means the driver is probably 80. A good example of how sequential IDs leak information and are generally a bad idea.