This is from an article about the Good To Go toll system published in April this year:
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/good-to-go-photo-toll-bills-driver-from-illinois-who-never-...
Snip:
"Dave Smithson lives more than 2,000 road miles from Seattle, in a suburb of St. Louis. He’s never been here, and up until the letters began arriving in January, never gave us much of a thought.
“I visited Oregon once,” he told me on the phone.
Yet Smithson, a middle-school teacher in Glen Carbon, Ill., is somehow the latest to be sucked into a bureaucratic whirlpool from which apparently no American now is safe. I’m talking, of course, about our Good to Go tolling system.
...
It started last winter, when Smithson got a bill for driving a semitruck across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge twice. At first he ignored it — because he drives a Mazda and he’d never even heard of the Narrows bridge.
But the bills, with added fines, kept coming. So eventually he called both the state and me [Danny Westneat, Columnist for The Seattle Times].
What happened is that the truck had a commercial plate with the same license number, but when neither Illinois nor our state noticed the difference, the bills were sent mistakenly to Smithson. In March, a supervisor acknowledged the error and said the charges would be cleared.
“She said it’s 99 percent certain I won’t get another bill,” Smithson told me back in March...
Sure enough, he now has received seven bills in all, with some additional fines added. The total rose to $41.50. The latest bill threatened to add $80 in civil penalty fines and put a hold on his car plates.
...
Glitches happen. But the number of billing errors and the trouble the state has correcting them is concerning as the state ponders huge expansions in electronic tolling.
In the past six months the state and its private Texas contractor, Electronic Transaction Consultants (motto: “everything you need for life in the fast lane”), have made one whopper after another. In October 3,350 drivers were charged double for tolls on I-405. In December an additional 126,000 drivers were overcharged. And last week 8,200 drivers suddenly got invoices for nearly $1 million in tolls that were stored, but never billed, for a year.
It’s possible that we’re not quite ready to use cameras, computers and the U.S. mail to manage a hundred thousand charges per day. Some say the state does not have the customer-service chops for such a massive billing operation..."
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