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Comment by dumbfounder | Hacker News Reader

I take this road, and while I feel a free market is great (which this isn't, there are only really 2 choices, my way or the highway), this is absolutely ridiculous. The problem is if I decide to take this route I have to go out of my way to get there. Then if I see that it's $30 I need to turn around and backtrack for like 10 minutes to take another route.

And we aren't talking about a long stretch of road. If it was 20 miles and it saved me an hour, awesome! We are talking about A FEW MILES and for my route it saves about 15 minutes.

And I might even sing a different tune if EZPass wasn't such an awful system. When you take a trip on the east coast and you forget to fill your stupid EZPass up manually beforehand, get ready for a ton of tickets! Oh, you remembered the morning of your trip, thank god! NOPE. F U. It takes like 2 days to process your payment.

F EZPASS AND THE HORSE IT CAME IN ON.

Not that I am mad or anything.

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>> and you forget to fill your stupid EZPass up manually beforehand

Why aren't you on autopay? This is a problem of your own making. I have the same, exact EZPass you have and I never have this problem.

I'm on autopay! If you use too much in one day it hits the bottom and then takes 2 days to process the new payment.

I was just thinking "this can't be right," I am very sure I have bottomed out my account before, I have it so low that a single trip to NYC will do that. Hell, I can bottom it out with a single trip over the George Washington Bridge. It costs $12.50 to get over the George Washington and my EZPass is set up to charge $20 if I go under $10.

So I just tried to make a one time payment, with a card I've never used on EZPass before to see if my balance will update right away and I got this message:

>Thank you for using E-ZPass! Your payment has been credited to your account and will be available for toll usage in 48 hours. If you have an email address on file, you will receive a confirmation email for this transaction. Please print this page for your records. View printer friendly version.

It does say two days to process payment!

But when I checked my toll balance the amount I charged is already added to the toll balance, so I actually CAN use it right away despite what it says.

In fact, in December I've had two EZPass autofills happen on consecutive days (I just checked) and unless I am mistaken that's impossible if the first payment took two days before I could drain it a second time to trigger a second auto payment.

So it looks like it happens at their discretion? It says it takes two days, in my experience it is immediate.

My EZPass account is 15+ years old, for what its worth. 15-20 or whatever years ago I set the auto-refill to be double the toll of the road I regularly took at the time so I'd never run out. Well now I've moved hundreds of miles away so my roads are different and the tolls on that road have more than doubled since then anyways. But I never changed my EZPass setting because it was never a problem!

That makes zero sense. Are you sure you're tickets weren't from speeding through the EZPass kiosk?

I know, that's why I hate it! I am looking at one now and I see no indication it was speeding.

I got 4 tickets when I drove up to Maine during the summer. Luckily, since it autopayed AFTER that day driving up it was full for the ride back.

Oh, you can contest the ticket, that sounds great! So you contest it, get a confirmation email, then 30 days later they send you another bill with a late fee. Absolutely nothing happens.

Want another awesome EZPass story? They have a version with a switch so you can ride HOV if you have 3 people in the car in certain circumstances. So I got one. Since I didn't actually use that feature in the first 30 or 60 days or whatever they told me I had to send it back.

Yeah, but the EZPass flex option is pretty clearly stated that you have to send it back if you don't use it...

No indication? What does it say it was for?

I'm not sure about you, but I have the option of having my EZPass balance refilled automatically after it gets below a certain threshold -- I have mine set at $10, but I don't go through a lot of tolls everyday. I get a statement every month saying when it refills itself from my bank account. Never have to worry about it, even when going on long trips!

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