I had a problem with someone else having registered their car at my address. Fastrak matched the address and automatically charged their tolls to me.

I used their terrible web portal to remove the other car from my account. They just added it back.

I called them and told them it wasn't my car, that I did not consent to the charges. They didn't care.

I ended up just cancelling Fastrak entirely and now I pay tolls only for my own vehicle manually. I can't use carpool lanes because of this.

I've been considering registering a Fastrak with someone else's address, just so I can use carpool lanes again.

That's awful but is pretty much confirming my experience. At the revenue level they have, you'd assume they could do better, but presumably having a monopoly means they don't have to care.

> That's awful but is pretty much confirming my experience. At the revenue level they have, you'd assume they could do better, but presumably having a monopoly means they don't have to care

FasTrak is a monopoly operated by a private, for-profit firm, accountable to it's owners. As long as complaints don't get to the body that oversees them and which is politically accountable to the public, they aren't going to try to do better, because that has a cost and reduces profits.

I assume it's a monopoly that a/the government created/enforces?

>I've been considering registering a Fastrak with someone else's address, just so I can use carpool lanes again.

Use the address of someone in management at Fastrak if you want the problem fixed.

Great idea honestly. I really like the feature where I can register my car to my account (in case I do not have my transponder) vs the old way where you just got charged a massive penalty fee.

But using someone elses address is a huge security problem

Or someone in local government/state government who has a bit of clout over them.

What FasTrak provider is this? They're different in different regions. Down here in SoCal Orange county has their own system, San Diego, Riverside, LA, you name it. They're all required by state law to use interoperable transponders but that's where it ends.

In the northeast we have E-ZPass which is equally evil.

- They too have a stupidly weird replenishment algorithm where it takes what feels like weeks to adjust. Then out of nowhere, it will increase many times even if you only increased travel temporarily. It went from maintaining a $26 balance to $180 which will take forever to use.

- "It is so hard to check and contest charges." - We used to have a business with two delivery vans with E-ZPass. We received a very high bill and it was full of "toll violation" charges which were 2 or 3 dollars that accompanied nearly every toll, some with two violations. I called them to inquire what these violation were and they flat out told me "we dont know." I forget the details but we wound up having to pay though the charges never appeared again. I feel like they robbed us using a computer glitch.

- "There is _NO_ way to check the transponder" - Yup. This is really frustrating because Ive gone on trips where the vehicle was supposedly on the account but the tag wasn't registering at the NJ tolls on I95 during a road trip. So I got a bunch of unpaid toll violations I had to manually resolve through their awful web portal. I then check the account and find the vehicle was not on the account - huh? I am sure I added it. Who knows...

I hate E-ZPass.

It's a symptom of contracting everything out to the lowest bidder.

In Washington State who has the "Good to Go" system. Its deployment has been full of quirks, my favorite of which was that if your balance ever went negative (say you had it set up to replenish at $5 but got a $10 toll) the system would refuse to charge you (even when you had a payment method on file or went to their website) and you had to call in and talk to a human to fix it.

Whoever the new provider is (I think there was a lot of pushback on the initial implementation) is far better.

They introduced "Pay as You Go" (direct tolling) so you don't need to hold a balance anymore. You'll basically just have a negative balance until they charge your card twice a month. Has surprisingly actually worked for me, and confirms that accounts can go negative now. I can choose to add funds or just wait for the charge to go through.

The best tolling experience I had was in Canada. Simply got a bill mailed to me in the US based on license plate.

Does that not work pretty much the same everywhere? On the rare occasion that I drive across the SR520 bridge across Lake Washington, they have no problem recognizing my Oregon plate and sending me a bill. Same when I drove through the Bay Area. Took them a couple weeks.

It does work pretty much everywhere, the catch is that some places will only bill you the toll amount. Other places will bill the toll plus a small convenience fee. Others will bill the toll and a huge penalty on top. Are you confident which jurisdiction you are traveling though? Has it changed since the last time you visited?

In northeast US, you get mailed a $50+ fine on top of the toll for not having an EZ Pass transponder.

That's harsh. Do they have tollbooths for visitors, then? Seems like the places I've been on the west coast with toll roads have ditched the actual toll booths and just use license plate recognition for billing cars without a pass. No penalty, but you get a discount if you have a pass.

Yes, there are toll booths. You pay with the time you spend waiting in line though.

The catch is that Canadian e-tolls are run by a private, foreign company which has been handed over PII for Americans by their own government.

That's a very broad statement.

TReO, the tolling system for the Port Mann bridge in BC before it was detolled, was built by a Vancouver-based company: https://oxd.com/work/treo-tolling-website/

And run by the TIC: https://www.ticorp.ca/

That is a political problem though, which seem easier to rectify than a technical problem.

First, they definitely don't contract to the lowest bidder.

Second, every tolling system is different. Sometimes the accounting (often called the back office system) is contracted out, sometimes it is performed in-house by the tolling agency.

Source: I work for one of the better quality contractors.

If they don't contract to the lowest bidder, they certainly feel like they're contracting to a grifter who certainly subcontracts to them.

Between:

* The implementation delays https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/jul/19/wsdot-reaches-...

* The payment issues https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sta...

* The customer support issues

* the sensor issues (admittedly those may be on the state and not ETC/ETAN, unclear)

and more the state abandoned its contract with ETC in favor of one with ETAN, which took the system offline for two weeks to switch over and admittedly hasn't been much better (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/wsd...).

God forbid we let the state hire a few local SWEs (Seattle doesn't have any of those) to write and maintain a system instead of paying $30M every few years plus a cut of tolls to whatever Texas contractor gave the most perks to a WSDOT exec.

I don't know anything about that particular case, and I would have agreed with you about the "few local SWEs", until I saw this side of the business. You would be floored by the amount of work and hoops that you have to jump through, and that's well before the SLAs and KPIs. Take a wild guess how much it costs to hoist, populate, and maintain a gantry with the associated sensors, cameras, etc. That's in the price tag, too. The SWEs aren't doing that work! The SWEs definitely aren't driving the test vehicles at the test track.

There's a good reason that the systems themselves cost so much money. Heck, it costs an arm and a leg just for the routine maintenance permits! The CI/CD, security, data persistence, data provenance, latency, and agency interop requirements are absolutely insane. Trust me, it's more than just a few SWE can handle.

Lastly, it's definitely not about any under-the-table dealings. There's just a huge amount of work! When deciding to whom to award the contract, they do background checks on key company people, look at past contracts, etc.

That's the reality of the situation.

Here around Denver, we have the ExpressToll system, which started out as the electronic billing system for E-470 (the toll-only highway that runs around the eastern Denver metro area), but then got adapted to the I-25 express lanes, and then to HOT lanes carved out of existing freeways (US-36 and northern I-25 first, then C-470, I-70 through part of the mountains, and more coming soon). They use either a basic RFID sticker that always charges the toll, or a switchable pass with two positions. One bad thing: "high occupancy," for which you can use the "free" position on the switch, requires 3 occupants now, not just 2.

The other toll-only highway, the Northwest Parkway, has its own pass system (GO PASS), but ExpressToll is compatible with it as well.

I have the sticker for my car; it's always seemed to work OK for me.

It depends on the issuing authority. I never had problems with excessive billing from the Thruway authority while mostly using it for NYC area tolls.

I had a motorcycle EZpass die after four years and I didn't know about it for nearly a year because many of the NJ barriers don't give feedback on the status. Looking back through the records I could see that I rarely got billed from a license plate read so I optimized my lane positioning.

I am not related to them in any way but I would recommend you to use privacy.com to control charges against your cards for situations like this. Capitol One has a service called 'Eno' and Citi has 'virtual account numbers' if you have either of those services they can also help you control charges in a much more granular way than using a regular credit card. Hope this comment helps someone like these services help me.

Have you actually used citi? When I last checked their web site for managing the virtual CC #s required flash.

They updated it recently to not use that

It was nice that the intermediate version beeped when getting pinged; the new flex version (with number of riders switch) is silent again. Maybe it's time to hack a tone into it.

The new Flex transponder (with 1,2,3 switch) does beep for me when passing a bridge toll port (84, 92 etc), not on the highway 101 lane.

How "new" is it? The new ones are not supposed to beep.

https://www.bayareafastrak.org/en/support/toll-tag-basics-fa...

Gumstick Flex from August 2019, but starts with 090 instead of 101 (one month early). Why did they remove the beep?

I have a new southern California FasTrak switchable, and it does not beep (it's not supposed to, either, per the toll agency: no battery, no piezo).

Ah, that's interesting. I've never heard a beep from any of my transponders, including crossing bridges. Is yours the "gumstick" one? (Thin rectangular one). A beep would be a step in the right direction (but doesn't solve my other grievances).

Mine beeps but it is an ancient model that is quite large (maybe 3 inches by 3 inches - square)

I have a gumstick Flex from 2019 and it beeps.

FasTrak has actually been surprisingly nice for me.

I love the ability to add cars by license plate to an account, and being able to specify exactly when coverage starts and ends down to minute precision. Renting a car? You can add the plate to your account for just the period you're renting so you don't pay the rental company fees.

I didnt know they added that - before you could just add a car or remove. Specifying when it starts and ends sounds like a nice upgrade

This reminds me, the tolling system for the SF bay bridges are even worse... for some resaon you have a narrow band of time to pay your toll and the payment options are super limited. I got Fastrak because of how big a PITA it was and I don't even live there (though it's also in use here in socal)

Aaah yes. A while back I rented a car in England, did a bunch of driving, and on my way back to the airport crossed the Dartford Bridge in the dark. For some reason you have 24 hours to pay it then it steadily becomes more and more impossible. I wasn't able to get online to pay it and flew out in the morning. Que a year of increasingly ridiculous demand letters from whoever runs that tolling system. They escalated to sending me bills in the US with short windows to pay which of course arrived after their demand window closed. So I never paid it.

For some bizarre reason, the Bay Bridge toll plaza does not recognize the 1-2-3 settings on the newer FasTrak tags.

We have something like that in New York State for me it is trouble free. I used to waste time stacked up in toll plazas around Albany but with EZ Pass I drive right through and don't feel like part of the problem.

Don’t transactions (should) show up in your online account pretty much instant? I thought they did for me.

I also hate fastrack and the “fast lanes”. Only good thing is they send you the transponder pretty much for free :)

I bought a new car and I couldn't figure out if my license plate has the digit '0' or the letter 'O', so I added both versions to my FasTrak to check which license plate would get charged. It took 4 days after crossing the toll to finally see the charge on my account.

I was about to say "there is no letter O, only number 0" but Wikipedia [0] mentions that California does have both. You can deduce which character it is based on position:

> California currently only uses I, O, and Q in between two other letters, for example "1AQA000".[citation needed]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_license_plate_de...

Not always. Particularly if you're driving outside of your provider's service area, it may take as long as a week for a charge to show up. I have a long commute right now and I sometimes don't see charges for days.

They (the Fastrack rep) literally told me to wait for days. In my experience there's at least a 24 hour latency.