Camden: Tolling system not always Good To Go!; mistakes occur
By Jim Camden
Published: September 2, 2015, 6:00am
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Ernest Hemingway may have been right about not asking for whom the bell tolls. But when the state of Washington tolls you, and you weren’t anywhere near the toll way, you should definitely ask. As in “What the hell?”
Don’t be deterred by the fact that the Washington Department of Transportation, and the private company under contract to run the Good To Go! tolling system, are extremely confident about their ability to correctly track vehicles that use toll roads and bridges, employing sophisticated scanning equipment to check license plates. If you drill down on the numbers, there could be hundreds of tolls assessed to the wrong people and one of them could be you.
Tolls may be the biggest difference between driving in Eastern and Western Washington. Toll ways have scanners to detect the “Good To Go!” passes of people who set up prepaid accounts, plus cameras to record the license plates of those who don’t. For the latter, they mail a bill to the owner of the car’s license plate captured on the scanner. Should the vehicle owner want to dispute the toll, he or she is advised to fill out an accompanying form and, as directed in bold letters, “attach the required documentation to support your dispute.”
I speak with some familiarity, having received two in the last eight months for crossing the Tacoma Narrows Bridge at times when I was not on it. I have crossed that bridge exactly once, paid the toll in cash and kept the receipt because the trip was for a story, which meant I got to charge the boss the $5.50. While I have a record of when I did cross, I do not have a record of when I did not cross, such a negative being difficult to prove.
Twice in eight months
The first time this happened, I called the toll-free number, and after pressing a series of buttons and waiting on hold, talked to a helpful woman who took down my license plate and notice number, and said she could look up the image from the camera that generated the bill if I would hold. A few minutes later, she was back on the line saying the computer made a mistake: my plate begins AEY, the plate in the picture starts AEX and finishes with the same four digits as mine. They’d cancel the bill, and presumably go after Mr. or Ms. AEX.
No harm, no foul, I thought.
Eight months later, another bill arrived. Different time and date, same bridge. Same phone call. Same wait on hold. Different attendant, but same explanation, and a promise to send the bill to AEX.
So, how often does this happen, I asked. “A very small percentage,” he said. That caused my reporter reflex to immediately ask what percentage?
Ethan Bergerson at the DOT later explained the system uses an optical character reader to scan license plates if it doesn’t detect a Good To Go! tag. Sending a bill to the wrong plate is “a really rare problem that occasionally occurs,” Bergerson said. How rare? Well, he had to check and get back to me, which he did, and estimated it at 1 one-thousandth of a percent of vehicles the machines read.
Those seem like pretty long odds, until one discovers the state had 35 million toll transactions last year, 13.8 million alone on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. So .001 percent of those numbers is a potential for 350 and 138 boo-boos, respectively, in 2014.
Still, with bazillions of cars clogging West Side highways, odds would seem against one driver randomly getting two bad bills in eight months. But it turns out bad reads are not totally random. A particular plate may be bent, or dirty. It could have some paint scraped off, it could have been tampered with. All of this could lead the scanner to read Xs as Ys, Bs as Ps, Es as Fs.
I don’t know if any of these conditions apply to my AEX doppelganger, but since we don’t know what caused the machine to misread that plate, there’s no assurance that it won’t happen again.
All I can hope is that Mr. or Ms. AEX doesn’t drive between Gig Harbor and Tacoma on a regular basis.
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