This Seems Silly

For the past few months there has been construction off of I-40 between Durham and Raleigh. Signs went up indicating a new section of Toll Highway on the Triangle Expressway. It was all a bit confusing because the signs read, "NC Quickpass" or "Bill by Mail". Also because in the two years that I have lived here, I have never paid a toll on a North Carolina highway. Cameron and I have an EZ Pass that he bought this past summer when he was in Princeton. Would that be accepted for this new toll? It was a mystery up until this past week.

To fully understand why this is worthy of a blog post, we must rewind just a few weeks. After leading a food tour in Raleigh, I was heading back to Durham to meet Cameron and friends at a bar downtown. Rosie (our trusty Subaru Legacy) has a built in GPS system and I usually use it when I'm heading somewhere from a direction that I'm not familiar with. On this evening I forgot to program the GPS and figured I could remember the route and figure it out on my own. Well those new signs confused me and I got off the highway a couple of exits early at I-540 instead of NC 147, oops! It was the strangest stretch of highway I've ever traveled. There were, literally, no other cars on the road. I actually wondered if I was on a highway that was not actually open for traffic. Then I went under a back to the future-esque structure that flashed as though there were a dozen paparazzi snapping photos. I guessed that was the toll...

The structure just beyond the bridge is the toll

When I arrived at the bar I told everyone about the strange highway and toll, but I was still completely baffled about whether or not the EZ Pass would be billed for the toll or if I was going to receive a bill in the mail. The whole bill in the mail thing seemed so ridiculous, but then this past week:

If you look close you will see that the NC Quick Pass (Company?, Authority?) paid $0.374 to send me two pieces of paper. The first slip of paper has a snapshot of my license plate, the date and time the photo was snapped and an amount that I owe, $0.77. The second slip of paper explains the new toll and attempts to get me to sign-up for an NC Quick Pass so that I can save 35%. This would require me to set up a pre-paid account and put a $5 sticker or $20 transponder on my car (mind you that would be in addition to the EZ Pass that is already mounted on my windshield). At the very bottom of the sales flier is a short explanation indicating that they are working on agreements with national toll collections systems like EZ Pass and SunPass, but have yet to reach that agreement. The NC Quick Pass, should you choose to sign-up and purchase it, will only be accepted in, you guessed it, North Carolina. Maybe this was part of North Carolina's effort to create new jobs; build a new stretch of highway, set up a new company (NC Quick Pass) to be in charge of the tolls, hire staff to work at said company, use USPS to mail bills...Ooh bonus(!), it attempts to keep our defunct USPS in business.

I will write a check for $0.77 and buy the $0.45 stamp to send my bill back, but doesn't this seem a bit ridiculous? Leave a comment to let me know your thoughts.