I recently received a notice from the Illinois State Tollway Authority for $396.40 in toll violations. Basically, the letter said that if I didn’t pay up they’d come after my driver’s license, and who knows what other bad things would befall me.
Here in Illlinois, we have a wonderful Tollway system that’s supported partially by the people who pass through tollbooths and drop in 80 cents to a few bucks, depending on where you are. (We’ll put aside the fact that the tollbooths were supposed to go away in the 1970s when the infrastructure was paid off.)
If you choose to blow off the toll plazas by zipping through the lanes designed for I-Pass holders (an electronic method of payment), the Tollway Authority will take a photo of your license plate and after you reach a threshold you receive a letter like the one above.
It should be stated that I am an I-Pass holder in good standing. My account gets charged, from what I can tell, every time I go through a tollbooth. It’s not out of the question to think that the tollbooth would occasionally not pick up my transponder. I just figured that somehow they would match the license plate on my account to the plate that they photographed and say “Okay, maybe he’s got a weak battery in his I-Pass” or something.
Nope.
Between July of 2006 and January of 2008 they caught my plate 19 times. At an average of $.86 per toll plus a $20 fine per violation, the Tollway Authority came to me with a bill for the aforementioned $396.40.
Now, here’s the really stupid part of all this:
I have “Park District/Youth” plates on my car: let’s say the number is “1234,” and the plate has a “YP” designation at the end of the number to differentiate it from any other “1234” out there. My registration from the Illinois Secretary of State’s office says that my license plate number is “1234YP.”
When I registered the I-Pass transponder, I told them that my license plate was “1234YP.” In the photograph that accompanied the letter, you can see I have the Park District plates with a number and “YP.”
Someone in the Illinois Tollway Authority’s office decided that this license plate belongs to a car that does not have an I-Pass registered to it, so the registered owner must be a scofflaw. So they go to another state agency, the Secretary of State, to get my name and address from the vehicle’s registration information. The Illinois Secretary of State’s office happily complies, and the violation notice is sent.
To put it another way, one Illinois agency will gladly pass along information to another Illinois agency as long as there’s bucks to be made. Let’s not let facts get in the way or anything.
In the middle of the letter, there’s a statement to I-Pass users that the notice may have been sent in error if the vehicle information is not up to date, so just call and they’ll take care of it. This is amid all sorts of nasty threats and admonishments.
After 45 minutes on hold, I was connected to a nice lady named Rachael who explained that “1234YP” is not, in fact, my license plate number: it’s “1234 / Park District Youth” and she’d be happy to change my I-Pass registration and remove the violations from my record.
I asked if I was the first person to have this problem and she said “Oh heavens, no. This happens all the time.” I had to ask if there was any way the Tollway Authority could communicate better with the Secretary of State– after all, they all have the same boss, right? She laughed and said, “You would think so, wouldn’t you?”
So let this be a cautionary tale: if you have special plates (or, heaven forbid are from out-of-state), beware that something like this may be lurking near you.
And sometime in the future, I’ll tell the story of how a local police officer stopped me and asked if my license plates were legal Illinois tags. But I’ll save that for another time.