Jun 30 2009
Maryland E-ZPass Angers and Confuses Me
I really like the idea of RFID road toll collection. It gets rid of the need for people to stand in little booths at all hours of the day to take your money $1.75 at a time. Unfortunately, the implementation on the east coast of the US, in the form of E-ZPass®, has sucked. They haven’t really removed any regular toll lanes–there are still 2 E-ZPass lanes and 5 or 10 cash lanes on most roads–and the state governments that administer the program seem to be going out of their way to make a good thing suck for everyone.
Maryland recently decided that they needed to charge a $1.50 monthly “account maintenance fee” to all E-ZPass account holders. They are not the first state to do this. On top of the $25 deposit I’ve already put down to cover the cost of the device, it apparently costs them $18 per customer per year more to run unmanned toll collection lanes than to pay a person to stand in a little booth. I don’t buy it, especially because toll collectors are state employees that make upwards of $12 an hour.
Anyway, the change from charging no fee to charging the highest fee of any state that administers an E-ZPass program has predictably caused a mass exodus of customers. There are a lot of people who are willing to put down a deposit and place a device in their car to save themselves and the state a little bit of time, but the subset of those people who are willing to pay $18 a year for the privilege, on top of regular toll rates, is (surprise!) much lower.
But here’s where it really starts to suck: I submitted a ticket online to have my account closed, oh, about two weeks ago. Despite a friendly automated email message saying my request would be processed within “5 business days”, nothing happened. So a week ago I started calling. I called the customer service number probably 100 times over the course of a week, and every time I got a busy signal. People are so busy closing their E-ZPass accounts that the state is not capable of closing accounts fast enough.
Today is the last day before the account maintenance fee takes effect. In an act of desperation I set Google Voice to redial the customer service number repeatedly until it was no longer busy. I sat listening to Google Voice’s ring for about 10 minutes, then sat in Maryland E-ZPass’s hold queue for another 5 minutes, and then was finally graced with 30 seconds of surly human contact — the first time I’ve ever required human interaction to manage my E-ZPass account, as a matter of fact. My account is finally closed, but I don’t know how many people are going to get charged a fee simply because Maryland isn’t capable of dealing with the attrition they’ve brought on.
Maryland, your E-ZPass system sucks and driving people away from it is mindbendingly illogical. Surely the system is most expensive to operate if no one uses it.
Somewhere out there some contractor is getting rich.
PA has a yearly fee of 3.00 and you can get your deposit back if the transponder still works.
I thought about getting an EZ pass, but now I think I will stick to the old way of paying cash, even though it is a hassle.
I wonder if the toll booths in IL still take pennies?
I ended up getting a new transponder from the Peace Bridge Authority (New York/Ontario). They don’t currently have any fees. If they start charging ridiculous fees I’ll go back to paying cash too.
It just seems like a shame to give up such a thoroughly practical use for technology.
shit, they get $12 / hour? That’s the job for me!
Secondly, E-Z Pass should take up the majority of lanes, then more people would do it, the fees could go down and we’d all be happy and driving 15-45 miles an hour through tolls.
I called them today to cancel. I asked them how much I would have to pay to re-activate my account. They said $46. Half of that $46 covers the cost of a new transponder. I explained that I have a perfectly good transponder. They said I should just throw that one away. This makes no sense to me. Why throw out a working device so that I have to buy another one down the road. They said their system isn’t set up to close and then reactivate over and over. I said that was because they never charged a monthly fee before.
Don’t we want people to use E-ZPass? Doesn’t it reduce traffic congestion? Doesn’t it reduce manual labor and the exchange of cash? And yet we discourage people from using it? This is not progress.
Well I called a few EZ Pass agencies in a few States. Turns out that you can get an EZ pass in any state and it will work on any toll road that accepts EZ Pass. Anyone who pay any fee for EZ Pass should call Indiana I Zoom (which is in the EZ Pass family). They will send you as many transponders as you want free. And there are NO FEES if you use a credit card and a checking account as a back up.
Phone 1-888-iZoom90(1-888-496-6690)
I just don’t understand the logic of putting fees on something that saves the State money and manpower. If enough of EZ Pass uses switch, I think the State will get the message..
EZ Pass commuter