Except that you can’t do that in some places, like MTA bridges, where there is a physical barrier that won’t go up unless you have an EZPass or one of the bridge employees ambles over to hit the switch, and it’s a 2-point penalty on your license for trying to back up to move over to a cash lane. Then us EZPass folks who are in the right place get stuck behind the jamokes (love that word, haven’t heard it in a long time) that can’t read.
I don’t love my “UPC status,” but I do love the convenience of being able to fly past all the other folks shelling out cash, especially when I go to visit my family on the Island on holiday weekends. I was one of the early adopters when EZPass first started, and I’ve never regretted having it.
I also think the potential for abuse is overblown. The bridge and tunnel authorities have benefitted hugely from the better traffic flow that’s possible with EZPass; I daresay they can’t afford pissing all those EZPass holders off to the point of giving up the passes. Besides, who wants to deal with the lawsuit that would immediately follow if some new traffic enforcement measure, say, were applied only to EZPass holders (e.g., speeding tickets issued on the basis of transit time between two tolls)?
In Illinois, the correct thing to do if you can’t pay a toll, is within the next 4 business days mail them a letter explaining and a check or money order with the missed toll amounts.
They have made it clear they will and have used the ipass information to assist police in their efforts. I will not be surprised if they start issuing speeding tickets based on times you pass certain points.
It does piss me off that they could have designed the system to work without the transponder give out identifying information, but chose not to. But not having one was unsafe. The exit and entrance lanes for non-ipass users are downright dangerous. Being in the middle lane at a stop and merging with traffic already doing +55 mph despite the 15 mph signs flying past is not for me.
I don’t understand why people are against EZ-Pass and the like. Why should I fight it? The only thing that they can tell is what times I used the EZ-Pass lane and where I was. Big deal, the only time I would have an issue with this may be if I was on the Pennsylvania or New Jersey turnpike, then I can see it being used to give me a speeding ticket if I went too far too fast between getting on and getting off the highway. If I decide I want to be sneaky, I’ll take the thing and throw it in the trunk.
I save time and I save money. It’s a win/win situation in my book.
My favorite (read: least) is when someone about 200 yards from the IPass booth realizes that they in fact do NOT possess an IPass transmitter. At that point, the car begins to sway gently back ad forth, signalling the indecision. At that point, the people in the “to be merged into” lane begin to bunch up the cars, as they don’t want the idiot cutting in line.
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But these guys are just dumbfucks - and apparently illiterate - and as such are perhaps excusable. It’s the assholes who who’re zipping along in the adjacent cash lanes and wait until the last fucking second to jump over to the I-Pass lanes, cutting me off in the process, that really chap my ass. Fuck, I’m from goddamned Ohio, and I figgered out how to use the I-Pass lanes in about two seconds without causing a potential pile-up. (Yeah, I drive a lot in the Chicago area, so I have an I-Pass transponder. And since they just doubled the tolls for cash payers, I’m glad I have it. Even tho’ it kinda bugs me that all the information they collect seems to be kept in perpetuity. First time they write me a speeding ticket for passing through two toll plazas too quickly is the day it goes away, tho.)
And the Illinoistollway site says they’re going after people who have accumulated 5 or more violations.
I did that on the New York State Thruway once. They had me mail in my toll ticket and the amount to the farthest exit from where I got on (which was actually what I owed), and a token fine ($10, I think).
Even though you may not have had problems, this is the wrong way to do it. You should alwatys merge as early as possible. When they let you in, they have to slow down, and the car bwhind them slows down more, and behind them ven more, and then you’re the cause of a traffic jam.
Ooo! I can top that! The South Beloit plaza on the Northwest Tollway has a 5-mph I-Pass Only lane between the manual and automatic lanes, originally dedicated to truck traffic, but now open to all I-Pass users. Unlike the car-only I-Pass lanes, there are physical barriers (knockdown hazard signs) marking the lane for about 50-100 yards ahead of the sensors. On at least two occasions, I’ve been stuck behind an out-of-region driver who make its about halfway through the barriers before the light comes on in their heads. It’s too late to switch lanes, so he stops and begins to back up! Meanwhile, a line is forming, there’s no place for him to go, and it usually takes a blast of horn to nudge the idiot through the plaza.
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Who was the fucking genius who decided to funnel three lanes of westbound I-90 traffic on the New York Thruway through seven lanes of manual tollbooths at Buffalo? It took me well over twenty minutes to get through that logjam yesterday.
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This fits with my experience. Twice I’ve been caught at toll plazas (getting off the highway with no attendant - not I-Pass) without change and have driven through expecting some sort of ticket to be mailed to me eventually. So far, no word from the state about paying up.
It was on the news that they are going after some with even one toll violation and what is more they tried to go after one woman who had a current working ipass unit for a single toll violation. There was a lot of flack about that on the news radio a while ago.
When the traffic engineers design the traffic control for construction, they figure full capacity up until the point where the merge happens. If everyone merges early, it can create a much longer back-up than originally planned for. This happened here in Austin when they were working on Lamar. They actually had to bring in signs saying “occupy both lanes until merge point” because early mergers were seriously disrupting traffic flow.
The quick answer is that because authorities will use the information against you. Its very easy to caculate your average speed between tolls and determine if you have exceeded the speed limit. In fact the police have issued speeding tickets based on the E-ZPass system in the past. Divorce laywers want the data to prove where someone was at a particular time. E-ZPass readers are installed along highways, not just at tolls, to gather information about who is going where and how quickly. As it stands now personal data is supossedly not being kept but I think we all know what happens over time with systems like these. At first they are not abused, but in time it becomes routine. Its the battle of the information age. Shortly someone will come along and state that if you are not doing anything wrong than you have nothing to worry about. Hmmm…where have I heard that argument before?
I really don’t want to turn this into a merging argument, we’ve had those on the Dope before. But I’ve seen it both ways.
If the traffic is moving at a decent clip, you get in early, while matching speeds; that moves faster. If the traffic is moving at this speed, though, nearly every time we hit the merge we slow down to a crawl because of the people trying to shoot in at the last moment and the people in this lane who can’t seem to comprehend the other person’s lane has ended.
If the traffic is already moving slow, better to shift over at the merge point because chances are you’re not going to be allowed in before that anyway, or people won’t see your turn signal. Then, at the merge signal, each person should let one person go, and it would run much smoother.
My my. That tinfoil hat becomes you! When I stop posting, you’ll be able to smugly enjoy the knowledge that the EZ-Pass Nazis came for me in the night. :rolleyes:
I’m not going to argue, I’m just telling you as an engineer how the traffic control is designed to work. The problemis that not many people know that’s how it’s supposed to work (I didn’t know it before I got into engineering) and get cranky when they think someone is waiting til the last second to get in.
It turns out that wrapping your EZ-Pass in tinfoil does work – in fact, question 7 in the FAQ here recommends using your tinfoil hat to wrap up your EZ-Pass if, for some reason, you want to pay cash. I can see how the paranoid among us might enjoy bringing a roll of foil along, getting onto a limited access road like the Turnpike, activate the jamming envelope, and then de-cloak right before the exit point.
I can even conceive of someone making a little box, lined with foil, into which someone could toss the EZ-Pass during long drives. An interesting side-effect of this would be to (ahem) foil the people trying to establish your travel patterns using just toll info. Drive north through a toll booth, drop the pass in a jammer box, and go back southbound paying cash all the way. Retrace your path in reverse, and EZ-Pass becomes an alibi that you were at a show in New York while you were committing the murders in Norfolk.
