So those radio waves don

Jeanne Thomas customer service manager at “Fastoll” bubbled with enthusiasm and told wonderul e-tag stories at her stand at the ITS “Congressional Showcase” in the House of Representatives Rayburn Office building June 26. She told of the guy who has his five and seven year olds taking turns to “pay the electronic toll.” They get to roll down the window, thrust the arm out and point the Fastoll tag at the Mark IV antenna/reader on the toll plaza gantry. He tells the kids it “works better” if the radio waves don’t have to “get in the car.”

Thomas runs customer relations at the Fastoll e-tag customer service center on Sunset Hills Road in Reston Virginia, an operation of Castle Rock Services of Leesburg VA. She offers an interesting perspective on the conversion to electronic toll collection. Her center has been providing e-tags for use on the Dulles Toll Road and the adjacent Dulles Greenway since April 15. Since August 8 — we updated the numbers — the center has been doing e-tolls at the Coleman toll bridge at Yorktown VA. Over 54,000 e-tags are now in use, doing about 56,000 transactions per day. As of mid-Aug 13% of DTR transctions are electronic and 29% of Greeenway transactions.

The biggest problem they have had has been tags that don’t work, mostly because of metalized material in some windshields interfering with radio transmissions, mainly General Motors vehicles she says, but a few others. Since Fastoll is not encouraging its clients to roll down the window and wave the tag at the reader it has its supplier Mark IV looking at an exterior mounting system for metalized windshields.

Aboutone in a thousand tags delivered have been returned to the factory as “duds,” Thomas says. They’d like no duds but she says the defect rate is not unreasonable. The Mark IV tags only get an acceptable rate of reads if they are aligned roughly parallel with the readers on the overhead gantries, which means that her customer service center tries to get its clients to fix the tags to the windshield. The terms and conditions of the Fastoll contract require this windshield fix. A few people leave their tags on the seat or keep them in the glove box, where they often won’t work.

Motor cyclists still have to pay manually, Thomas says, because there is not any acceptable procedure for attachment of a tag to a bike. A few motorcyclists get tags anyway by saying they want one for their car. For the most part though the electronic conversion is a success. Demand was greater than expected and the service center had to extend its hours and hire extra staff.

Unlike the situation in California where on SR-91 Express Lanes customers showed up by the hundreds and one week lines formed around the block, in Reston VA “we hardly see any of our customers.” Most of the ordering is by phone and fax. Tags are sent out by regular USPS mail, which Thomas says, guarantees a next day delivery. And she says the mail performs in Northern Virginia, not something that can be expected everywhere in the country.

Most people, Thomas says, are very “matter of fact.” They like the convenience of e-tolling but “they don’t want to know about it, or about us.” Few of the issues of privacy that activists raise are of concern to ordinary people and few people fear they will be cheated. After a couple of million toll transactions only a handful of people have contested a billing. Fastoll offers to send its customers a telephone style monthly account specifying precisely the time and place of each individual billing, but she says “almost noone” is interested in that, “just commerical customers really.” (Jeanne Thomas, Fastoll Customer Service 703 708 9339)