E-Z Pass Mistake= Costly Roadtrip

Okay, here's the post I've been promising about the E-Z Pass.

E-Z Pass seems like a great idea. You whiz past the toll booths up and down the East Coast and money is deducted from your account instead of having to stop and fork over your cash.

To obtain an E-Z Pass transponder (which is attached to the upper part of your windshield, ) you stop in your local office and register your vehicle and deposit money into your account.

We've had issues with being able to figure out what our toll is on toll roads. Some toll roads give you a ticket that has a handy chart on it. Look up where you entered/exited the toll road and it tells you how much to pay. It never seems to be the same amount on the same stretch of road.

On our trip back from New England on one particular toll road, we dutifully pulled up and collected our ticket. A few hours later, we approached the toll booth. My husband frantically read the ticket trying to figure out what we owed. He noticed that the ticket was marked "Class B3."

"What does that mean?" he asked as he searched the chart on the back of the ticket. We pulled up to the toll booth and "$9.05" popped up on the display.  Grumbling, but with no recourse, we paid our toll.

As we drove down the road, my husband used his Android phone to look up "Class B3" and discovered it meant "Bus." While our 2006 Honda Pilot is admittedly a bigger vehicle, it is certainly not a bus. Without a receipt, we couldn't prove what we'd paid.

We'd paid a total of $15 on the way up to New England and at least twice as much on the way back.

Sadly, it appears this is not a single occurrence.  A cursory Google search pulled up numerous complaints here, so of which are similar to mine.

I think we may sign up for the E-Z Pass just so that we can more easily track what we use and what we were charged for.