For Asa Erickson, the Maryland Transportation Authority's proposal last week to charge a $1.50-a-month fee for an E-ZPass account is reason enough to drop the service. And he believes he's going to have a lot of company.
"I'm not going to pay that fee," the 32-year-old northern Baltimore County resident said. "They're going to have a huge number of people dropping their accounts."
Perhaps. But Maryland motorists are going to face two trends in the coming years: Toll roads are becoming more common, and toll booths are going extinct. Drivers might want those E-ZPasses.
And officials in nearby states say that when they imposed fees similar to the ones proposed in Maryland, hardly anyone dropped their accounts.
Last January, the Delaware River and Bay Authority, which operates the Delaware Memorial Bridge, introduced a $21 transponder charge and $1.50 monthly fee identical to what Maryland is proposing.
Jim Salmon, spokesman for the authority, said there was an initial negative response to the proposal but that most customers kept their E-ZPasses. He said about 1,400 of the more than 40,000 customers who had been issued E-ZPasses through the authority dropped their accounts when the new charges were introduced, but virtually all of them were infrequent users who had little effect on congestion on the bridge.
The charges did not stymie the growth of E-ZPass use on the bridge, Salmon said. Electronic toll collection accounted for 60 percent of the bridge's business last year, up from 57 percent in 2007.
The Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission, which operates seven toll bridges between New Jersey and Pennsylvania, had few cancellations after it imposed a $1-a-month fee last month. "The best way to describe it would be a hiccup," spokesman Joe Donnelly said.
Peter Samuel, editor of Frederick-based Toll Road News, said that is consistent with what he has seen around the country. "I've never seen any drop in the percentage of the people using E-ZPass as a result of those fees," he said.
For Erickson, who said that he drives on a toll road or bridge only about five times a year, it probably makes sense to turn in his E-ZPass transponder. The amount of time he saves might not justify paying $18 a year, plus the new $21 charge to replace the previously free transponder when its battery gives out after an estimated seven years of operation.
