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I just returned from a trip to Boston. While there I rented a car from a major agency. I've rented cars plenty of times over the years and it is usually a mildly annoying experience: you wait in line for 30 minutes, you get 10 minutes of upselling at the counter, you get FUDed about having "secondary insurance", you have to inspect the car with the representative - if you miss a dent then you're responsible, etc. This is the normal level of annoyance I am used to.
This time, I encountered another annoyance: cashless toll roads and bridges of which there are apparently many on the East Coast of the US. The toll fees are a couple of dollars if you pay cash but very often there is no cash option and you just see a sign telling you you will be billed by mail. Uh oh... you know that is going to hurt. True enough, if you happen to cross one of these cashless tolls you will get billed by the rental agency for $14.95/day of your rental plus the $1.75 actual toll charge. This is a bridge too far and I am looking for alternatives.
With Uber eating into the taxi business, I started wondering about peer-to-peer car rentals. A little duckduckgo-ing turned up a wikipedia article with a couple of companies looking promising, e.g. getaround and hubber. Has anyone used these? Are there hidden fees and annoyances? Dare I ask... what about tolls? ;)
Original Submission
(Score: 1) by hb253 on Saturday June 20 2015, @12:26PM
At least in the NY/NJ area, there are ALWAYS one or more cash lanes available. The OP is either exaggerating, wrong, or lying.
The firings and offshore outsourcing will not stop until morale improves.
(Score: 4, Informative) by iwoloschin on Saturday June 20 2015, @12:29PM
Really?
http://web.mta.info/bandt/html/cashless.html [mta.info]
No cash lanes available there. So you're wrong.
Boston is similar, we've got the Tobin bridge that is now all cashless, but I believe that everything else still has cash lanes, which is really a huge pain in the ass because they cause traffic. Significant amounts of traffic, at least here in Boston.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2015, @01:09PM
> everything else still has cash lanes, which is really a huge pain in the ass because they cause traffic.
As ever, we sacrifice our privacy for convenience.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2015, @01:58PM
The huge pain is from getting assfucked by northeastern states for toll to cross any puddle.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Saturday June 20 2015, @04:40PM
No, he's not, you're ignorant.
Yes, when I was in NY/NJ, I always saw cash lanes. However, in Portsmouth Virginia, there's two toll tunnels and a bridge, and there's no booths at all, just EZ-Pass. If you don't have EZ-Pass, you get a hefty bill in the mail. It's not *that* expensive, about $3 per toll (plus the cost of mailing in a check), but it's only $0.75 if you have EZ-Pass.
Getting a $15/day charge for this from the rental car company is insane. It would make a lot of sense to just buy an EZ-Pass and bring that with you when you're going to rent a car on the east coast.