FastLane and E-ZPass troubles: Part 1
(flickr tags: ezpass, fastlane)
[This is Part 1 of what will be 2 or 3 posts about the problems with FastLane.]
A while ago, my husband and I got an E-ZPass (the New Hampshire equivalent of FastLane), thinking that it would save us a lot of time. Not too long after, we stopped using the transmitter and canceled our account. Here is why.
Not too long after we got the E-ZPass, we started noticing that sometimes we’d go through the toll plaza and see a yellow light. Our initial reaction was “Huh? what does that mean?”, so next time we paid a little more attention and noticed a message on the light that said “Low Bal” or something to that effect. Ok, we thought, no big deal. It’ll just get automatically charged from the credit card. So after that, we pretty much ignored the yellow lights we’d get occasionally because they clearly were just a warning that you needed to put more money on your account and that’s done automatically. We didn’t get them all the time, just one here and there over a period of several months.
Then one day, we came home and found two letters from the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, telling us we’ve been recorded as toll violations at two tolls and that we had to pay $50 for each violation. Clearly this was a mistake, we thought, since we have the E-ZPass. And, indeed, they had a whole section in the letter dedicated to addressing the possibility that we have the pass and something just went wrong. However, this meant that we had to send them a copy of our E-ZPass statement for the month the violations were recorded, pay the toll that we supposedly didn’t pay, and pay $5 for administration fees per violation.
It was that last part that caught my attention. $5 for administration fees? Didn’t they screw up, not us? Why do we have to pay for their mistake? Seemed like a money-making scheme to me.
We decided to pay the $10 plus tolls for those violations (not like we really had a choice), but then we were much more careful with those little yellow lights.
It didn’t take long for us to get a third violation notice in the mail. Great. Another $5 thrown away for nothing.
This is where we really started thinking about what the heck we were paying for. It cost us something like $30 to get the transmitter in the first place. At that time there wasn’t any discount on tolls for using the pass, so we weren’t saving any money there. We just wanted the convenience of not keeping coins in the car and going through tolls faster. But now, within a couple months, we had paid an additional $15 for this “convenience”. It’s not a lot of money in the big picture, but it is a lot of money for the few tolls we went through with the pass that were around $0.50 each.
So we paid our last $5, took the transmitter out of the car, and canceled our account. We figured it was worth the inconvenience of keeping coins and cash in the car if we could save almost $50 (possibly a lot more).
Recently, my husband got a new job that requires him to commute every day via a toll road, so we decided to look into FastLane (now that we’re officially Massachusetts residents) again. This time we were smarter, though, and did our research about how you can avoid these violations and administrative fees.
