“Is there a Day Fast Track”?

TOLL ROADS NEWSLETTER receives many emails intended for southern California’s toll roads (because our URL is so similar to theirs – they have ‘thetollroads.com’ and ‘tollroad.com’ and we have ‘tollroads.com’). This is one of our favorites: “Is it possible to purchase a fast track for one day? We have a school field trip planned going into OC in the early morning, and will be driven in private cars. Thanks for the info. If so, how long would it take? We’re going next Thursday.” To do TCA a favor we replied on their behalf: “FasTrak transponder not available for one day. Bring cash and please pay our friendly toll collectors at the cash plazas off to the side.”

Actually TCA should offer FasTrak-for-a-Day. People would call an automatic telephone response system or go to a website, pay by credit/ATM card, or give a check and bank account number, and give their license plate number. And maybe the body color of their vehicle for checking uncertain character reads. That puts their vehicle on a white list in the toll management system. Then, when they drive through the ET-only lanes without a transponder they get separated out from the black list of guys blowing through just to evade the toll. All the hardware is there now. All they need is some programming. You finance it with a small surcharge on regular a ET.

Any tollster with an advanced license plate imaging system for violation detection/enforcement and a modern telephone system could do it. It’s like importing a little bit of 407-ETR from Toronto. Its being done on Melbourne CityLink in Australia.