Paying tolls online

[jim]

Leave it to Illinois to screw the pooch on this little programming project. Coming back on the tollway Monday, the lineup into the manual booth was too long and we forgot to bring my wifes IPASS. So screw it, I just drive through the automatical lane and figure I'll pay the toll at home on the computer.

Here is how it goes...

Main page, click "Pay a Missed Toll" which takes you to another screen. "Do you want to pay a missed toll?". Yes, so i click again on the "Pay a Toll Violation" (notice the slight change in words to fool you into thinking you are answering a different question). That takes you to "How to pay a missed toll". "Do you want to pay a missed toll?". YES, I WANT TO PAY A FREAKING MISSED TOLL!. Press the "Oops I missed a toll" icon and want to pay online. That takes to yet another screen, "How to pay a missed toll online".

GEEZ O PETE. I WANT TO PAY THE FREAKING TOLL! WHERE DO I PAY THE FREAKING TOLL AT?

Press "Click here to proceed to the pay toll online screen".

Are you eligible to pay online?

YES, FOR THE LOVE OF PETE I"M ELIGIBLE AND I WANT TO PAY THE FREAKING THING ONLINE!!!!!!

Now, I'm at the opening page which describes the 7 steps to pay. Are you sure? I"M GOING TO DRIVE TO SPRINGFIELD AND KILL SOMEBODY. JUST LET ME PAY THE TOLL.

Finally, after hitting the Continue link, you get to the screen to fill out.

Having grown up in Springfield I realize how incompetent our state is. But this takes the cake.

edit - Let me summarize this fiasco.

Do you want to pay a missed toll?
Do you want to pay a toll violation?
Do you want to pay a missed toll?
Did you miss a toll?
Do you want to know how to pay a missed toll online?
Do you want to proceed to pay a toll online?
Are you eligible to pay an online toll?
Are you sure?
Is all of the information you typed in correct?
Are you sure?

[Arthur Dent]

Hilarious. I remember old computer programs used to be like this. "Are you sure?", "Are you sure you're sure?", "This could be a huge mistake!", etc. What website did you go to? I tried illinoistollway.com which didn't seem quite so bad. It was just "pay a missed toll", "pay online now", and "I am eligible to pay online" before I got a form.

Also, I don't understand Illinois toll roads. Are they just on the honor system? The one time I drove on the loop road to get to O'Hare coming from Champaign, there was a automatic toll taking basket on the final exit with no gate and no amount posted. There was some sign about how you should pay later if you didn't have change. I think I threw in $0.25 or something but I have no idea whether that was right. How do they even enforce this?

[G. Keenan]

How do they even enforce this?

They probably don't. I was coming back from a pumpkin patch last fall and we just drove through the automatic lane. Waiting would have meant, literally, at least an hour in traffic. I don't think there were any consequences.

[AJ]

Don't want to rain on anyone's parade but:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... ?track=rss

The Illinois tollway hasn't sent out violation notices for almost a year, allowing thousands of scofflaws to drive Chicago-area toll roads each day without paying missed tolls or a $20 fine per offense, officials acknowledged Wednesday.

Officials at the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority said they stopped mailing violations in September to the registered owners of vehicles without I-PASS accounts to ease the transition to a new contractor handling toll violations.

But toll cheaters shouldn't expect their free pass to last. Officials said they plan to begin mailing violation notices late this month to recoup millions of dollars in unpaid tolls and fines, although it could take at least another month before the backlog is cleared.

And the toll authority never will be able to recover the bank interest lost from not collecting fines as violations occurred.

Officials said they could not immediately put a dollar figure on the uncollected tolls and fines. But the tollway has collected between $13 million and $17 million annually in fines over the last few years, records show.

In addition, an undetermined number of I-PASS customers who failed to keep money in their accounts to pay tolls or had other problems, such as a dead transponder battery, did not receive warning notices from last fall until this spring, toll officials said. Those I-PASS drivers will be required to pay missed tolls, but not the $20 fine per violation, officials said.

"Am I disappointed in the time lag? Sure," said Brian McPartlin, the toll authority's executive director.

"But the bottom line is that if you violate, we are going to pursue you and collect," he said.

Officials said scofflaws who fail to pay the $20 fine per toll violation will see those fines escalate to $70. Unpaid fines could result in suspension of driver's licenses and vehicle registrations.

About 2.1 million toll transactions occur each day on the 274-mile tollway system. With a scofflaw rate of about 4 percent, some 85,000 violations are recorded daily. Over 11 months, the unsent violation notices could have represented millions of incidents.

Violation notices are triggered upon the third offense in two years. However, once a notice is sent out, the missed tolls and the $20 fine per incident are assessed against the registered owner of the vehicle caught on camera blowing off a toll payment.

The toll authority isn't required to send out notices in a timely fashion. However, the tollway's policy is to send out notices for violations that are no more than two years old.

In their defense, tollway officials said more than $200,000 in missed tolls has been collected since the agency began allowing online payments for missed tolls last year.

The holiday in going after who are considered true toll cheaters -- motorists who don't have I-PASS and drove through open-road tolling lanes or unstaffed ramp plazas repeatedly -- has been unavoidable, tollway officials said.

The toll authority and its new contractor, Electronic Transaction Consultants Corp., are consolidating the various types of violations -- I-PASS customers vs. vehicles without I-PASS accounts -- into one system, officials said.

The company, based in Richardson, Texas, took over from TransCore Inc., in September. TransCore was first hired in 2002 under a three-year, $38 million contract to force toll cheats to pay up.

Electronic Transaction Consultants was awarded a five-year, $78 million contract in 2005 to help revamp the toll and violations collection systems, improve the tollway's customer service center and consolidate different functions to increase efficiency. The contract included converting 20 traditional toll plazas to open-road tolling for I-PASS customers and reconfiguring cash lanes at plazas.

"Before when a customer called, a violations clerk could not provide information about an I-PASS account," toll authority spokeswoman Joelle McGinnis said. "It's all being unified."

Enforcement against toll cheaters was frozen to help ease the transition to the new contractor, officials said. Data on some 3 billion toll and violation transactions are still being shifted to Electronic Transaction Consultants, McGinnis said.

The switch is taking time because the features that the tollway asked Electronic Transaction Consultants to build are complex, said Tim Gallagher, the company's managing director.

"We are making sure that in the future violation notices will be pulled together instead of being sent out to people in a piecemeal fashion over an extended period of time," Gallagher said.

"The new system will also do a better job of treating I-PASS users who commit an occasional toll violation as customers, not as violators," he said.

Asked why the toll authority failed to arrange a cleaner handoff between the two companies, McGinnis said: "Our first priority was to get toll collection up and running. We also want to make sure that we are issuing true violation notices to true violators."

Tollway officials said they do not think incidents of unpaid tolls have increased since violation notices stopped going out last year, but they acknowledged they won't know conclusively until all the data from TransCore is sent to Electronic Transaction Consultants.

Toll officials also pledged to adopt an aggressive approach to bringing in lost revenue.

"I'm a toll-paying customer myself and I don't want to let anyone off the hook," McPartlin said. "The money is sorely needed to expand and maintain the tollway system."

[UK]

Jim, you get 3 strikes before they actually mail you a bill. It's a 20.00 fine for each violation, but like I said, they won't mail it until you've committed 3 violations.

[jim]

Hilarious. I remember old computer programs used to be like this. "Are you sure?", "Are you sure you're sure?", "This could be a huge mistake!", etc. What website did you go to? I tried illinoistollway.com which didn't seem quite so bad. It was just "pay a missed toll", "pay online now", and "I am eligible to pay online" before I got a form.

Also, I don't understand Illinois toll roads. Are they just on the honor system? The one time I drove on the loop road to get to O'Hare coming from Champaign, there was a automatic toll taking basket on the final exit with no gate and no amount posted. There was some sign about how you should pay later if you didn't have change. I think I threw in $0.25 or something but I have no idea whether that was right. How do they even enforce this?

That's where I went. Maybe I clicked something different that threw me back a couple of steps.

It's not the honor system. If there wasn't an amount marked it was mislabeled - which alot of them have been lately. The reason is there is two amounts now - if you have IPASS it's 1/2 the cost. That's our brilliant governor's idea.

I don't know how they enforce it. If we could just get everyone in mass to take out their IPASS cards and just blow threw the tollway we would overwhelm it and there is no way they could keep up.

[haltz]

I had a BLaw professor that represented some iPass offenders. I think she said there was one guy who had just been driving through for years and had racked up a nice five-figure bill.

[jim]

I had a BLaw professor that represented some iPass offenders. I think she said there was one guy who had just been driving through for years and had racked up a nice five-figure bill.

If we could just organize, and have everyone refuse to pay then how could they keep up? The roads were only supposed to be tollways for 20 years. Those 20 years expired over 20 years ago.

If they were nice roads that would be one thing. But as a frequent traveler on I90 from Wisconsin, it's horrible. You get to the border with a sign that says "The People of Illinois Welcome You and Your Loose Change" as you get your eyeteeth shook out from potholes that didn't exist before that sign. They are making some attempt at something based on all of the barrels I see out, but I've yet to see one worker actually doing anything.

[AJ]

How much does the actual toll collection infrastructure cost?

Wouldn't it be much much cheaper to tax for those roads some other way, without the fancy IPASS and toll collection infrastructure?

But no, there are so many fat cat jobs and contracts with the tollway, even after they cleaned some house a couple of years back.

[jim]

Jim, you get 3 strikes before they actually mail you a bill. It's a 20.00 fine for each violation, but like I said, they won't mail it until you've committed 3 violations.

I have serious reservations whether the state has the competency to keep track of this properly.