It Might Not Always Hurt To Ask, But It Costs

I was driving from DC to Maine. I hadn’t gone this route for years, and wasn’t used to the new toll booths. It used to be situated so that you had to go through a toll lane and either pay $0.35 by tossing the coins into a basket-feeder, or through a lane with a sensor for an E-ZPass. The new arrangement had all the cash lanes separated from the E-ZPass lanes, the latter of which no longer had narrow booth lanes.

So at the first toll plaza, I was too far to the left and drove through an E-ZPass lane. I didn’t think much of it, but then I made sure to stay far right for the remaining tolls before I got to New York.

About a month later, I got a bill from the New Jersey Turnpike Authority. (They’d ID’d me by my license plate from Virginia). Fair cop, so I expected to pay the toll and a penalty for not paying the toll initially.

No, I was only billed for the toll: $0.35. They instructed me to send a check or money order (no cash) via the pre-addressed postage-paid envelope. Since money orders cost 50 cents, I wrote a check for “Zero and 35/100 dollars” and mailed it.

So, to get their toll, they had to spend about a whole dollar in postage. It was nice that they didn’t penalize me, but it would’ve been cheaper for them to just forget it.