Spin Control: Bridge tolling system leaves room for mistakes

OLYMPIA – Ernest Hemingway may have been right about not asking for whom the bell tolls. But when the state of Washington tolls you, and you weren’t anywhere near the tollway, you should definitely ask.

As in “What the hell?”

Don’t be deterred by the fact that the Washington state Department of Transportation, and the private company under contract to run the GoodToGo! tolling system, are extremely confident about their ability to correctly track vehicles that use toll roads and bridges, employing sophisticated scanning equipment to check license plates. If you drill down on the numbers, there could be hundreds of tolls assessed to the wrong people and one of them could be you, whether you drive on the West Side or not.

Tolls may be the biggest difference between driving in Eastern and Western Washington. Spokane hasn’t had a toll since drivers got to stop throwing spare change at Maple Street Toll Bridge baskets in 1990. West Side tollways don’t subsist on nickels and dimes like that bridge once did, and some don’t even have toll booths. They have scanners to detect the “GoodToGo!” passes of people who set up prepaid accounts, plus cameras to record the license plates of those who don’t. The latter they dun for the toll if it isn’t forthcoming, mailing a bill to the owner of the car’s license plate captured on the scanner.

The bills are serious-looking government documents with the amount owed, a two-letter, nine-digit notice number and a deadline, after which the fine begins to climb and civil penalties loom. They also cite the time, date and location where the toll was assessed, and the license plate of the offending vehicle. Should the vehicle owner want to dispute the toll, he or she is advised to fill out an accompanying form and, as directed in bold letters, “attach the required documentation to support your dispute.”

I speak with some familiarity, having received two in the last eight months for crossing the Tacoma Narrows Bridge at times when I was not on it. I have crossed that bridge exactly once, paid the toll in cash and kept the receipt because the trip was for a story, which meant I got to charge the boss the $5.50. While I have a record of when I did cross, I do not have a record of when I did not cross, such a negative being difficult to prove.

The first time this happened, I called the toll-free number to plead my case to be freed of the toll, and after pressing a series of buttons and waiting on hold, talked to a helpful woman who took down my license plate and notice number, and said she could look up the image from the camera that generated the bill if I would hold. A few minutes later, she was back on the line saying the computer made a mistake: My plate begins AEY; the plate in the picture starts AEX and finishes with the same four digits as mine. They’d cancel the bill, and presumably go after Mr. or Ms. AEX.

No harm, no foul, I thought.

Eight months later, another bill arrived. Different time and date, same bridge. Same phone call. Same wait on hold. Different attendant, but same explanation, and a promise to send the bill to AEX.

So, how often does this happen, I asked. “A very small percentage,” he said. That caused my reporter reflex to immediately ask what percentage? He didn’t know, had no way to find out, and suggested I call the Department of Transportation, because he just works for the private contractor that provides the department with GoodToGo! monitoring and billing.

Ethan Bergerson at DOT later explained the system uses an optical character reader to scan license plates if it doesn’t detect a GoodToGo! tag. If the scanner is more than 90 percent sure of the number it is seeing, it sends the bill to the owner of the vehicle tied to that plate. If it’s 90 percent sure or less, it kicks the photo to a human being, who has a bill sent if the plate can be read with certainty. If no certainty, no bill.

Clearly the system surety was above 90 percent in my case, because real people each time caught the mistake.

Sending a bill to the wrong plate is “a really rare problem that occasionally occurs,” Bergerson said. How rare? Well, he had to check and get back to me, which he did, and estimated it at 1 one-thousandth of a percent of vehicles the machines read.

Those seem like pretty long odds, until one discovers the state had 35 million toll transactions last year, 13.8 million alone on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. So 0.001 percent of those numbers is a potential for 350 and 138 boo-boos, respectively, in 2014. And more coming this year as the state opens a new stretch of tollway next month. It’s true that many of those transactions wouldn’t have their plates scanned if their owners have GoodToGo! bar codes available, but it’s also true that when dealing with numbers in the millions, a thousandth of a percent ain’t nothing.(Note: An early version of this column miscalculated the number of mistakes.)

Still, with bazillions of cars clogging West Side highways, odds would seem against one driver randomly getting two bad bills in eight months. But it turns out bad reads are not totally random. A particular plate may be bent, or dirty. It could have some paint scraped off, it could have been tampered with. All of this could lead the scanner to read Xs as Ys, Bs as Ps, Es as Fs.

I don’t know if any of these conditions apply to my AEX doppelganger, or if a shadow caught that plate in just the wrong way to twice give the scanner a bad read with high certainty that he was me. But since we don’t know what caused the machine to misread that plate, there’s no assurance that it won’t happen again.

All I can hope is that Mr. or Ms. AEX doesn’t drive between Gig Harbor and Tacoma on a regular basis.