VA: “Bag them Damn Yankee Tags”

VDOT’s Smart Tag newsletter (Summer 99 p1) warns patrons to “make sure your non-Virginia transponders cannot be detected by the Smart Tag system.” They are instructed to: “Either shield them or remove them.” If you don’t, it says “the Smart Tag system may read the wrong transponder” and then “you’ll be cited for not paying and the system will charge you for the next driver’s toll, thinking your Smart Tag belongs to them.”

Got that?

Seems there is a growing problem of E-ZPass customers driving on Virginia’s toll roads, and of Virginia customers getting themselves Maryland or E-ZPass tags as well as their VA Smart Tags. They are technically identical of course, all standard Mark IV e-tags. So if you’ve got a pair of tags on your windshield it will be pot luck which one the ET reader reads first. If it reads the VA tag first you’ll be OK but the guy behind may get charged as having a bum tag on account of your E-ZPass tag returning an invalid signal to the Smart Tag system. But if your E-Zpass tag gets read first you get charged as a violator and your Smart Tag account gets tolled on behalf of the guy following. Lucky him, he doesn’t get tolled!

There can be similar screwups when a family gets a couple of tags for say three cars and moves the tags between vehicles and someone manages to go drive the toll road with two tags in the one vehicle.

VDOT spokesman told us the problem is not a large one. But it is large enough for them to warn patrons about in the newsletter. As for making those Outastate Tags compatible he says that is definitely in the department’s ‘business plan.’ Maryland is a member of the E-ZPass group and is working on making its tags compatible with those of the rest of the northeast, though when that will be achieved is unclear. MD has to work out how to make its commuter discounts compatible with E-ZPass. Maryland M-TAGs are used in the Baltimore tunnels, only 100km from the Dulles Toll Road/Greenway system where VA Smart Tag reigns. They are sprading up to I-95 where they’ll be very close to the E_ZPass system on DE’s I-95, and then they progress to the Chesapeake Bay bridge where again they will interact with a bit of DE traffic on the Delmarva peninsula.

Virginia is not necessarily going to join the E-ZPass group, we were told. There may be arrangements that can be made with major nearby states with tags impinging on VA without it having to formally join E-ZPass. Like making arrangements with MD, DE and PA? But not with NJ, NY, MA etc. Do we really have to have those guys in Randall’s Island dictating the Commonwealth’s Smart systems, one official says.

But heck this subverts the E-ZPass ideal which is one-in, all-in, and let’s make it seamless across the whole system. Trouble is the E-ZPass arrangements get more complicated by the square of the number of participants (if our higher math is high enough.) Each day each system has to upload to all the other systems its file of valid accounts and each day it has to download all the valid account numbers of the other E-ZPass systems.

Virginia is wondering whether it really needs all those MA and NY numbers every day and whether they need its numbers. As the agency to agency file transfers proliferate, the question becomes: when does a central data clearing house become more efficient?