Smile for the toll road cameras!
The Harris County Toll Road Authority is nabbing drivers who owe thousands of dollars in tolls using a new technology that signals when repeat offenders enter the tollway.Cameras stationed at busy toll lanes send e-mail alerts to county dispatchers when one of the top 500 scofflaws - who owe between $2,000 and $30,000 - drives through an EZ Tag lane without paying.
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Most cameras stationed on toll roads take photos of vehicles that fail to pay upon entering, so the county can mail them tickets.
The new cameras contain software listing top violators' license numbers so when one of those vehicles is photographed skipping a toll, a dispatcher at a control center receives a real-time message and can alert an officer in the area.
"Instead of relying on patrol vehicles to drive around, it puts all the traffic through the filter and finds the wanted vehicle," said Jim Tuton, CEO of American Traffic Solutions Inc., which runs the camera system for the county.
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The list of license plates identified by the cameras can be changed at any time, which makes the technology useful for other purposes as well, including tracking stolen vehicles.
Look, as with the red light cameras, I don't have a philosophical problem with using technology in place of traffic cops to help enforce the law. There's no right to skip paying tolls any more than there's a right to run red lights. What concerns me here is the same thing that concerns me there: What controls exist over the data that those cameras are collecting? Who has access to it? How long is it kept on somebody's servers? What about backups?
It's the scope creep that's worrisome. Nobody objects to recovering stolen cars, but what are those "other purposes", and who gets to suggest new ones? What if anything can the Harris County Toll Road Authority do that the City of Houston cannot?
Oh, and in case you're wondering how anyone can rack up $30K in unpaid tolls:
The technology allows deputies to focus on catching repeat violators while they're still on the toll road illegally so they can be arrested and charged criminally. Scofflaws tracked down at home, where they have ignored ticket after mailed ticket, face only civil charges.Drivers can be caught on camera twice with no penalty. The third violation in a year results in a fine including the amount of the unpaid tolls, plus an administrative fee for each violation. More fees are added once the bill is turned over to a collection agency or court.
So frequent violators can end up owing thousands of dollars, as much as 10 times what the tolls would have cost.
So frequent violators can end up owing thousands of dollars, as much as 10 times what the tolls would have cost.
Talk about your revenue streams! And while I don't intend to defend toll-skippers, I feel compelled to note that zipping through the EZTag lane without paying is not generally correlated with causing accidents. This feels more than a wee bit out of proportion to me.
Not really. When you consider that the cost of a toll may be $1.25 and then compare that to the manpower required to collect the tolls that aren't paid...$12.50 isn't so much. Actually it seems to me to be a little bit low.
Posted by: Patrick on December 19, 2006 8:00 AM... zipping through the EZTag lane without paying is not generally correlated with causing accidents.
But backing up because you just realized you're in an EZTag lane is. And I see that about twice a month - absolutely terrifying to watch in rush hour.
Posted by: Charles M on December 19, 2006 9:21 AMPatrick - I meant the monetary amounts are out of proportion compared to those for running red lights, which is known to be dangerous. Having said that, I also think there's some economy of scale here. Is it really twice as expensive to collect $2000 as it is $1000, and is it really ten times as expensive to collect $1000 as it is $100? I'm not convinced.
Charles - True, but this is about nailing the repeat offenders. The folks who are trying to back out of the EZTag lane may be idiots, but I doubt they're serial toll-skippers.
Posted by: Charles Kuffner on December 19, 2006 10:00 AM