In March 2007, Florida firefighter Christopher M. Baird started getting traffic citations, after the E-PASS toll transponder in his wife’s SUV failed. Although Baird had kept his address properly updated with the Department of Motor Vehicles, officials mailed a stack of sixteen tickets to the wrong location. Baird first learned of the problem while trying to renew his car registration. Despite the lack of proper notice, he was given no chance to be heard on the matter. Instead, Baird was forced to pay $1448 in fines to renew his vehicle registration and was hit with 48 points against his driving license, resulting in an immediate suspension. In April, Circuit Judge John Galluzzo found the actions of toll road officials “outrageous.” He ordered Baird’s money refunded and license reinstated, and extended his ruling to all toll violation tickets issued to motorists in Seminole and Brevard counties– as long as they held a valid toll transponder account. And then…
The Florida Department of Transportation and Orlando-Orange County Expressway Authority filed an appeal, insisting that their due process rights were violated by the circuit court opinion’s extension of the principle to every motorist within the circuit court’s jurisdiction. The appeals court has agreed. Thousands of Florida motorists will once again be liable for toll road offenses that they did not necessarily commit. Of course, all “toll cheating” tickets issued against motorists in Seminole and Brevard counties will be immediately reinstated, regardless of whether the motorists had a valid toll transponder account at the time of the offense. [click here for the full story from thenewspaper.com]
I hate living in Florida. Dimpled chads, sucky sports teams (why the Dolphins can’t beat the Texans is beyond me), Jack Thompson (hardcore video gamers would understand), summer heat, hurricanes and now this… :-(
One would have to read the ruling, but I would be surprised if the Appeals court reinstated Mr. Baird’s tickets. After all, his specific issue was not challenged, only the question of due process with respect to all the other pending tickets.
So if I was in Florida, my response would then be to get rid of my e-pass that may or may not work and pay with cash. Every Time.
That should solve traffic problems, no?
***
One of the actual _GOOD_ things about living in the Chicago area is the ipass system.
For $20 you get a transponder (easily cloned…so I’ve read here on TTAC) and login online. Put some money on it. Register your car make/model, etc.
if the transponder doesn’t register, the Computer OCR looks up your plate in the database to see if it is registered to a pass. IT does make mistakes.
I did get a bunch of tickets at $20 ea. (toll is $0.50), so I call up, get a human on the phone, read off the ticket #’s, give them my ipass account. They verify the plate is there on the a account & subtract the $2.00 or $3.00 that the state would have taken & dismiss all the tickets. It takes less than 10 minutes.
As a bonus, I have added on a few extra plates of parents & friends who only take the toll road occasionally. They have never actually physically had the transponder in their car, have zoomed through i-pass lanes & have never gotten a ticket. It should automatically (or semi-automatically) be deducted from my account.
If you zoom through Ipass without paying, you can login online, put in your plate, and toll location & pay online.
A little over one year ago, I had to move from southern Florida and back to Indiana. I was starting to miss the place more than ever, even with all of Florida’s faults.
Between this and my recurring nightmares about traffic congestion, psychotic road rage and unaffordable housing, I’m now starting to wonder if I should move back to Florida after all.
Oh hey, you know what I like? Living somewhere that doesn’t ubiquitously charge tolls on interstate highways.
I read the decision and find no fault with it. Baird was not screwed by the decision. His fines were set aside and the Department did not challenge that portion of the decision. It was merely the intermediate appellate court’s attempt to act as a court of original jurisdiction that was set aside (as it should have been).
Florida residents hate the tolls; or so we like to say. But apparently we don’t hate them enough to eliminate the politicians that favor them, however.
Nor do we desire to eliminate the judges who support invalid toll charges.
In Orange County, we can directly vote out our judges. Yet we don’t…
So once again, the evidence shows that we are really getting exactly what we want. I am left to believe that we must actually want toll roads and the accompanying errant electronic tolling and ticketing systems.
Silly me, I thought road taxes (from license plates), federal income taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes, taxes on taxes and property taxes were enough to pay for the roads which we the people supposedly own.
So when you drive down them, you get to pay on TOP of that for every trip?!
Well, all I can say is, the fact that we don’t have that crapola in Michigan is about the only good thing about living here.
Certainly the roads aren’t any damn good.
Oh yes, also the beautiful fall colors. That’s another nice thing about Michigan.
And the Mackinac bridge, too.
Of course if you ask me how I feel about living here in January, you’ll probably get an earful. After 3 months of being up to my @ss in snow, I’m usually ready for a break.
kovachian – I made the same move a year ago. Since I can listen to Neil Rogers online, the only thing I miss is Publix.
We are going to be moving in a few month also and I am going to really miss Publix. Don’t live in Florida though, 20 miles north in Georgia. We were thinking about going to Florida but now I’m glad our plans changed.
In California they are called freeways for a reason. But the bridges are another issue. The Golden Gate Bridge promised that it would have no toll after it was paid for. That happened in the mid-1930s. But yet it costs $6 today. Go figure.
To everyone who has moved out of Florida or changed your mind about moving to Florida: Good. Tell your friends not to move here either. More room for me. I don’t like toll roads either but in NE FL we don’t have them. I had enough of them in the Peoples Republic of New Jersey. In NJ the tolls were supposed to pay for the bonds taken out to build the roads. Then the tolls were to be taken down. That worked out real well.
Did you think that you were living in the USA and not a dictatorship? Why does this not surprise me? Apparently they have no requirement to handle monies with any sort of ethics whatsoever.
The Turnpike Trolls have bought a judge, apparently, with all of their filthy money. I guess they buy a lot of lobbyists with their spoils from screwing the public for nothing, and providing no real services in return – in short, on of the most useless government services around! Ask your toll operator what you get in return for your money that they steal from you.
This just goes to show that Florida needs more LEGAL and FINANCIAL oversight in the whole area among DOT, Florida Turnpike Enterprise, OOCEA, Post Buckley (PBS&J), and all of the other interoperability partners and orgs that contract with them. Didn’t PBSJ have some outright embezzlement scandals? Too bad they are still entrenched in the Turnpike, they have not earned the public’s trust by any stretch of the imagination.
The toll company is currently wasting tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Their upper management team has not been stable for many months now and quite a few people have left including directors and above the level. A lot of the key people have gone to other related organizations which also may be a conflict of interest.
The toll company has also paid a team of java developers located at 7700 Southland Blvd Orlando Fl to write code for years, then arbitrarily decide not to put it into production. All of this is at the cost to the taxpayers and driving public. SOMEONE SHOULD INVESTIGATE THIS !
If you get around any of the hugely popular places like Disney World and you will pay thru the nose for EVERYTHING. I just made my first – and last – trip there by auto.
NEVER AGAIN!
Not only do the toll roads soak every bit of money out of your pockets, they do so very inconveniently for everyone.
And, the political temptation to screw around with the money is apparently irresistable:
http://www.tollscreategridlock.org/oocea-corruption.html
Buy a GPS and avoid the blood suckers . . .