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.