Wow… this thread split to isolate the RFID blocking in wallets/bags and almost immediately shifted to RFID in general (distance, passports, toll sensors).
As these newer toll systems get refined (license plate readers, etc.) it seems like having the RFID tags becomes less needed for the general public. There will still be a need for commercial tags or the ones that allow you to designate the number of passengers for CarPool lanes/discounts. Eliminating the rest would save a lot of resources.
SF Bay Area (and California) started with FasTrak RFID and implemented the license plate readers to catch those who did not have them or when the sensor did not register, which happened more often than one might think even with a good battery. The Golden Gate Bridge went fully automatic toll (ie. no people in booths) in late 2013. It was the first 100% automatic toll bridge in CA and one of the first in the U.S. The change was supposed to reduce costs and help offset a significant budget deficit for the GG Bridge.
The license plate system has mostly proven itself out over time and then with Covid in 2020 they pulled the physical employees from all toll plazas and are not bringing them back. There are unfortunate side-effects to this, such as no cash option at the toll location. Some folks lament the loss of the little game of “coin basketball” as they drove through, but that has been gone for years since the prices increased.
These are not mutually exclusive. Around the Bay we have both tollbooths (unmanned) and scanners. FasTrak for the tollbooths is discounted and you can autopay. Also, FasTrak allows you to indicate how many people are in the vehicle (FasTrak Flex), so if you’re actually carpooling, you can take the express lane for free. But if you’re from out of state (or a scofflaw) they’ll snap a pic of your plate and bill you through postal mail (at extra cost). Picture quality IME is excellent.
Fun fact: the State of CA apparently only has contracts for plate lookup and remote invoicing with BC and AB. So if you brought your car from say ON, as long as you don’t yet have your new CA plates, you can essentially go toll free. Not that that’s legal, but it is known to work among Canadian newcomers.
I hate to take this more off-topic… but there are both interior “stick on the inside of your windshield” scanners and license-plate mounted scanners. As far as I know, technologically they are the same. Some vehicles have windshields that have metallic material in the glass that prevent the inside-the-car transmitters from being read, so those vehicles require license plate mounted transmitters.
I am sure that they are using license-plate readers. Many states, including mine, have replaced toll booths with automated tolling that uses license plate scanners to bill the driver, though they attempt to charge first using EZPass (or other similar systems) if the vehicle has one. Also, I am required to provide the license plate info for my vehicles in the state’s EZPass database because occasionally the devices have a poor read and they used the license plate as a backup cross-reference.
I actually have two different state EZPass transmitters, as one car almost always travels in my home state while the other almost always travels through tolls in the neighboring state, so both states have both vehicle license plates in their systems - because sometimes I switch the transmitters between vehicles. And the reason I have one for each state is that the states give discounts to EZPass devices in their own system compared with EZPass devices that are registered in different states. So when I am traveling to, say, NY and NJ, MA will charge me less that NY drivers would pay while driving in the state, while NY and NJ charge me more than they charge their home state drivers for the same tolls.
When I was a kid in the 1970s and traveled in the mid-west I always loved that. It was my job to stick my head out the window and throw in the quarters (that was after we did a frantic car search for spare coins when we saw signs a toll booth was ahead).
Yeah, I think they charged me $7 while the sign said $4. Plus I had to mail a check with a 60-cent stamp! If I lived there, I’d definitely get an EZ Pass.
I rented a transponder with a car in Florida once (Orlando), but it wasn’t worth it. I think the rental car company charged me $8/day for the sensor so it cost me $24 for 3 days, but I probably only ran into about $10 worth of tolls. (I didn’t know the area so I had no idea how many I’d hit, but I’d heard there were a lot. I was at a conference so I didn’t drive that much. Live and learn.)
When I was a kid in New Jersey around that time, the Garden State Parkway had toll booths that took one quarter per car, so one time I tossed in 25 pennies. It chugged its way through all of them and then rose the bar so I could drive on.
NY had a problem with a license plate vendor (prison?) a few years ago (2020-2021) where the printed surface began to delaminate after a few years. Hard to read! Coincidentally, today (12/1/23) is the first day that pealed plates are illegal to use.
When I was a kid in New Jersey around that time, I specialized in tossing the quarter from the passenger side window over the top of the car and into Garden State Parkway toll booth bucket. A hook shot! Nothing but net!
That (and the subsequent comments on the point) are jolly interesting, but as I indicated at the outset, my pass is not an E-ZPass (which, being English, I pronounce as “ee-zed-pass” and wonder vaguely why it’s so named); it’s made, or operated, by Ulys and/or Vinci in France.
The segment was “shot” in the actual toll booth on the Long Beach Causeway. And at the time, Long Beach Island was known to be where some actual high level “Godfathers” lived.
It’s too bad Sonny didn’t “keep his enemies closer” like his father advised. That’s what Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple after being kicked out and left for dead by the company he founded. He dealt with them bit by bit on his own time while living in Palo Alto.
I have read about errors caused by not reading the state correctly, and people with the same license plate number as a driver who went through the toll booth but from a different state got billed for the toll plus some collection amount because the toll hadn’t been paid in time. And the toll authority refused to consider this to be a possibility. (Apocryphal, of course, but it was on the internet and therefore true.)
Yep…happened to wife and I back in the 90s or early 00s…got a bill from CO but we lived in VA and had not been there. Worked out via a letter to the company.
Presumably, if the photo of your tags is good enough quality to read, then they should be good enough for a human auditor to identify the state, even if the automated software got it wrong.
I suspect errors like this happen for two main reasons:
States have hundreds of designs each.
When I was growing up, each state had one design - one color letters on a different solid color background. While the colors did change occasionally, these changes generally lasted for at least 10 years.
Today, each state has a large number of designs, where the colors, background and sometimes even font and layout are different. (e.g., here’s Virginia’s page.) And designs from one state may look very similar to designs from another state.
The text identifying the state is often covered or obscured. Some states put their name at the top of the plate, and some put it on the bottom. If your have a frame around your plate, that frame often covers the state name. And if you have an external E-ZPass transceiver, its preferred mounting position (on the top of your front plate) may cover the name.
It’s supposed to be illegal to mount anything that obscures the text of the plate, including the state name, but I’ve seen a lot of cars where it is obscured, so I suspect this law isn’t enforced very often.
If the state name isn’t visible, it can become much more difficult for software to identify the state.
These parts people drive around with impunity despite tags that ran out 2022 or paper plates (yeah, that’s a thing around here) that expired in 2019. And these are not poor people, we’re talking $80,000 cars. There is no more vehicle enforcement around here. Not even for really dangerous stuff like running red or refusing to yield to peds.
It’s the same here in New York City and environs. And there is also a major plague with long term truck parking on city streets. It’s significantly cheaper for truck drivers to pay for a street parking ticket than pay for parking spots in NYC sanctioned truck stops, which the powers that be haven’t changed for many decades. In addition to being annoying, there are problems with loosing parking spaces and clogging lanes. No matter how much residents complain, nothing ever changes. Many parks, cemeteries, playing fields and playgrounds, walking paths, etc. suffer from this.
Fake paper license plates are also a horrible problem here. The traffic cameras can’t recognize them.
I did quite a bit of web searching and amazingly, I couldn’t find any site where someone performed a tear-down on one of the devices. Which is a shame, because that’s what we need to know for sure.
That having been said, they make some pretty large coin-shapped batteries. I think the largest standard cell is CR2450 (24.5mm diameter, 5mm thick). Energizer’s battery has a capacity of 620 mAh (with a self-discharge rate of about 1% per year). So for a 10-year lifespan, a device would need to draw no more than about 170µA per day. If you’re driving through four toll booths per day, then we’re talking about 40µA per scan, and a near-zero power consumption when it’s not being scanned.
That seems pretty low, but I’ve seen some extremely low power microcontrollers. And depending on the size of the unit, they may have two or three of those CR2450 batteries in it, which can double or triple that power budget.
You must be from an interesting place.