Published in the Asbury Park Press 4/08/01 By JASON METHOD STAFF WRITER

Is E-ZPass easy?

Elizabeth and Edward Schultz of Lakewood are not convinced yet.

Sliding through toll plazas now may be a time saver, but the Schultzes were fined $25 three times last month for the privilege -- even though their E-ZPass account statements showed the tolls had registered at the plaza and the money was deducted from their accounts.

Elizabeth Schultz, a 47-year-old analyst at Fort Monmouth, was angry enough to send a letter to E-ZPass officials threatening to cancel her account and go back to using old-fashioned tokens on the Garden State Parkway.

"I think there's a problem with the system," Schultz said. "I shouldn't be getting these violation notices. It's an annoyance. . . . If we've gotten three in three weeks, then we must be the tip of the iceberg."

After a month, Schultz said she has not gotten a response to two letters contesting the fines, which she has not paid.

It has been more than two years since E-ZPass debuted in the Garden State. But implementing the system has been anything but easy for a regional consortium of highway and bridge agencies installing the cashless electronic toll-collection system.

Customers like Schulz have complained to the E-ZPass centers and the media about being fined, even when they have accounts. Others lament computer mistakes that charge them 50 or 90 cents for a 35-cent toll on the parkway. Others gripe about motorists weaving across the approaches to the toll plazas to get into the correct lanes.

Meanwhile, skeptics still decry the plan to rely mostly on fines to pay for the $600 million system. E-ZPass is millions of dollars behind in collecting fines.

Officials at the New Jersey Turnpike, the lead agency among the E-ZPass consortium, say they are working on the problems.

"We're on a learning curve," said Edward Gross, executive director of the turnpike authority. "There's gradual improvement. . . . When you deal with millions of transactions a week, something is bound to happen."

Turnpike spokeswoman Lynn M. Fleeger said last week that of 1.7 million violation notices issued since the E-ZPass start-up in July 1999, 210,567 were dismissed because of technical glitches, usually because the alleged violator was an E-ZPass account holder.

Those numbers do not count the passenger car drivers who say they are charged the incorrect toll.

But Gross contends many of the drivers have caused their own frustration.

Gross said he sent out a team of supervisors recently to view drivers as they passed through E-ZPass lanes. In an off-peak hour, the supervisors counted 15 to 20 motorists holding up their transponders and waving them as they drove through the plaza, instead of having the white electronic boxes mounted on the windshield.

Such "wavers," as Gross calls them, increase computer mistakes and are responsible for many of the fines meted out to account holders, he said.

"If you multiply that by how many lanes we have, you're talking about thousands in a day," Gross said.

Before fines are mailed out, the violations center checks the license plate against a database of account holders. But turnpike spokeswoman Fleeger said many account holders have not provided plate numbers because of privacy concerns, or they fail to update numbers after they buy a new car.

Yet even when the electronic systems work, other problems can arise.

Of the 1 million violations levied in the past 20 months, about 75 percent have not yet been collected, Gross said. That's 750,000 fines of $25 each and tolls of 35 cents, for a total of $19 million.

Gross said the consortium will likely hire a collection agency within 60 days and is "very close" to sending out municipal court summonses.

A fine collection shortfall could pose problems for the roadway authorities later, since the fines are supposed to pay for the millions of dollars in bonds used to pay to install E-ZPass.

In December, the five agencies operating E-ZPass reported that they would have a $65 million deficit to deal with by 2008, when $300 million in bonds comes due, instead of the $35 million surplus they had originally forecast for the system.

Yet such high-finance issues seem far removed the travails of the average commuter.

Leonard Piekarski, a 47-year-old upholster who travels from his home in Ocean Township to Staten Island, said he frequently sees older drivers struggle to get into E-ZPass lanes, and said he had been wrongly fined as well.

"I've got four different cars, and you can use the transponder in each car. But you have to give them all the license plates. I didn't know that," Piekarski said. "I think E-ZPass is really good; I just think they have some kinks to iron out."

Laurine E. O'Neil, a Little Silver stockbroker, said she took a friend's car on a trip last Novem-ber, and she swore she held the transponder right up to the glass where it normally would be mounted. The E-ZPass exit sign signaled that she had paid in ev-ery tollbooth, but her friend paid $75 in fines for three violations.

Even more frustrating, O'Neil said, was that her letters last year to the violations center contesting the fines have yet to be an-swered.

"I haven't heard anything. I think it's pretty crummy. It's not very businesslike," she said. "They fig-ure they have the fines. It's mon-ey in their pockets."

Gross said despite the figurative bumps in the road, E-ZPass has eliminated waiting lines at all turnpike tollbooths, except for busy exits 9 and 11 and leading into the Lincoln Tunnel.

Waiting lines on other toll roads have decreased as well, he said.

"This is the most significant im-provement since the toll roads were created," Gross said.

One measure of anger might be the number of commuters who cancel their accounts. But the turnpike reports that of 623,025 E-ZPass accounts, just 2,478 have been closed.

Schultz of Lakewood tacitly agrees with Gross.

Yes, she said, her commute has shorted significantly, and she had not made good on her threat to quit E-ZPass.

"It's faster. It's definitely more convenient," Schulz said. "(The mistakes) would have to build up to a bigger level of frustration than this" to quit.

Published on April 8, 2001

http://www.app.com/news/app/story/0,2110,378347,00.html

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2001