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Why doesnt the West Belt have 4 EZ tag lanes?

2,282 Views | 20 Replies | Last: 9 yr ago by TwoTimeAg
exp
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AG
With traffic levels, even three EZ tag lanes is cause for a backup. Converting a 4th lane would be an easy way to improve flow without much actual construction.
jamesf
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They should just bite the bullet and go all ez tag or pay by mail. Dallas has converted all of their toll roads to cash-free.
CrossBowAg99
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HCTRA tried to go cashless a few years ago on the BW. The lolpoors complained and the county commissioners are very sensitive to political heat.

They will never build another road with cash lanes, but they aren't going to take them off of the BW any time soon.

The BW is such a critical artery that removing a cash lane or lanes to add an eztag lane would just make the cash lane queue back up for miles and make the problem worse. There is a certain percentage of the population that will not get a credit card so they can't get an easy tag, but they will use the road and wait regardless.
cajunaggie08
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But why can't hctra use existing technology to bill by mail versus just ticketing everyone who uses an eztag lane "illegally?" The bills can be paid by cash. Every toll plaza is a bottleneck and it defeats the purpose of paying to be on the road...not that i have much choice.
CrossBowAg99
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quote:
But why can't hctra use existing technology to bill by mail versus just ticketing everyone who uses an eztag lane "illegally?" The bills can be paid by cash. Every toll plaza is a bottleneck and it defeats the purpose of paying to be on the road...not that i have much choice.

Can they, yes. But it is very inefficient. Also, the technology exists, but they probably don't have it integrated into their system.

The real reason that they want to get away from cash, besides the traffic problem, is because it cost a lot more to process a cash transaction versus an eztag/cc transaction.

Eztag is a few cents on the dollar and cash is something like 3x that much. I am not sure how many millions of transactions they do a year, but it adds up. I am pretty sure they do plenty more than a million transactions a day.

Say eztag cost them $0.05, cash costs them $0.15, and pay by mail costs they $0.25 per transaction.

I think the toll roads in Austin went away from pay by mail.

The cash people are paying for it because they cash toll is more expensive than the eztag toll.
Satellite of Love
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quote:
I think the toll roads in Austin went away from pay by mail.

Nope.
CrossBowAg99
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quote:
quote:
I think the toll roads in Austin went away from pay by mail.

Nope.

Well, Austin (TxDOT Toll Roads i.e. SH 45, LP 1 & SH 130) didn't want to do pay by mail to begin with, but they are doing it to try to get people to use their roads.

TxDOT is not doing it on their Houston roads (SH 99 Seg E & I-1) because they don't have to in order to get the traffic.

HCTRA is not going to do it unless they have to.
Al Bula
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Surely it would save money to lay off the surly tollbooth workers. They are on par with fast food workers when you think about the mental ability required to do the job.
LostInLA07
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Fast food workers have to be able to handle multiple order combinations and THEN accept payment and count out the change the register calculates for them. Toll booth payment acceptors only have to do the last part.

And the tech is already installed for pay by mail...how do you think they send violation tickets?
CrossBowAg99
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quote:


And the tech is already installed for pay by mail...how do you think they send violation tickets?


I am sure that your plan will work flawlessly. So a government agency that has no desire to do pay by mail has it all set up and ready to go? Sounds legit...
cajunaggie08
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quote:
quote:


And the tech is already installed for pay by mail...how do you think they send violation tickets?


I am sure that your plan will work flawlessly. So a government agency that has no desire to do pay by mail has it all set up and ready to go? Sounds legit...
This time they do. Everytime a car goes through an eztag lane without a registered eztag, a ticket is mailed to the address registered to the car's license plates. They already charge higher rates to those who pay by cash. Why not tack on a few more cents and bill people for going through eztag lanes without a tag rather than waste time mailing a $75 ticket that most likely will go unpaid.

Somedays it is quicker for me to go through the cash lane with my eztag on the north plaza than to sit in the eztag lane traffic as a 4 lane freeway condenses to 3 because everyone is trying to merge into the eztag lanes.
StillNotAnAggie
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I have a hard time believing that HCTRA has their system set up to do anything in advance.

If that were the case, they should build a check in their system that says "Hey, before I mail this ticket to the address from the license plate, maybe we should check to see if that license is in our system..."

That would avoid me from getting 1 ticket a month and having to deal with those idiots on the phone for an hour each time.
butthead
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quote:
Why not tack on a few more cents and bill people for going through eztag lanes without a tag rather than waste time mailing a $75 ticket that
most likely will go unpaid.

Ding Ding.

Get rid of cash lanes, and mail bills with the technology obviously already in place. Instead of the ridiculously high 'fine' or what have you that forces you to sign up for an account with a credit card (which the cash people know about, so they stay out of tag lane to avoid that $50 charge), just raise the 'license plate toll' a $1 or 2 over a 'tag toll' to cover the expense, and the driver can pay by mail or go stand in line and pay cash. They will quickly learn to put a credit card on file. Save the money and the time. HCTRA is enabling those with credit card phobias.

Or, just keep cash lanes, and start hiking the hell out of cash tolls, keeping card tolls the same. They can thin out the cash herd real quick, and before you know it, most riders have a tag.

The solutions just seem to easy to me.. Other cities do it, and BW already has the cameras and sensors in place.

Why this has continued to go on status quo I will never understand.

butthead
CrossBowAg99
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Yes, they have a violation processing system to do exactly what they are doing today. It mails you a ticket and adds like $25 to it for the fine.

If you guys think that they can check a box and magically turn it into a pay by mail system, them who am I to judge.
Dill-Ag13
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A cash-free BW8 would save me 10 mins a day on my commute home
exp
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This is such low hanging fruit. Let's please make this an epic TexAgs coup, like getting Rhett Bomar kicked out of OU, etc. TexAgs knows things.

I say we start by voting Ed Emmit out of office. That jerk off lost any credibility with his Astrodome inter Jews.
JJxvi
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quote:
Yes, they have a violation processing system to do exactly what they are doing today. It mails you a ticket and adds like $25 to it for the fine.

If you guys think that they can check a box and magically turn it into a pay by mail system, them who am I to judge.


I suspect altering the system from mailing violations to mailing bills would be negligible when compared to the rest of the task, which would be to physically get the lanes ready for all tag and change all the signage.
CrossBowAg99
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YellAg2004
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In response to the original question asked at the start of the thread, no additional EZ Tag lanes can be added through the plaza without making some serious modifications to the plaza structures themselves. Even if the plazas were modified, adding a 4th EZ Tag lane would create a downstream merge issue between the high-speed tag traffic and the low-speed cash customers.
chico
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There already ARE 4 EZ tag lanes: 3 in the left lanes and a 4th tucked over on the right between the full-service toll booths.
Vernada
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Hell it'd be an improvement if northbound at least had ez tag sensors at each of the pay lanes.
TwoTimeAg
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Austin has done away with most, if not all of the cash lanes as well.
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