The report from SPUR, a San Francisco urban planning research organization, analyzes a system that mails out millions of violation notices each year, many of which never get to the drivers they're addressed to.
The system has left some motorists facing the possibility that what may start out as a handful of unpaid $6 tolls can metastasize into hundreds or even thousands of dollars in fees and penalties they have little hope of paying — and which can lead to their vehicle registrations getting blocked.
"They're pushing me into bankruptcy, basically," said Kelly Cadwallader, an Alameda resident facing a bill of over $30,000 — more than 90% of it in penalties. "It's inevitable at this point, because they're not letting me make a deal."
Lower-income drivers bear heaviest burden
The SPUR study, "Bridging the Gap," finds the biggest debt burden tends to fall on lower-income drivers and Bay Area neighborhoods with substantial populations of people of color and non-English-speaking residents.
Jacob Denney, SPUR's economic justice policy director and one of the report's authors, said breaking down 2019 toll penalty data by ZIP code shows that "our lowest-income communities and our most diverse communities were the ones who are disproportionately receiving toll violations. We're talking about per capita rates of more than one toll violation per person living there."
Among the communities cited in the SPUR report and in a parallel Metropolitan Transportation Commission analysis as having high levels of violations are parts of Oakland, Richmond, Vallejo, Pittsburg, Antioch and San Francisco's Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood.
Not much cash recovered
The SPUR report also finds that the penalties, administered by the FasTrak toll collection system, are largely ineffective at getting drivers to pay tolls they've missed.
MTC statistics show that just 12% of the 5.1 million "second notice" violations issued between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31, 2021 — which carry the maximum penalty of $70, plus the original $6 toll — were actually paid.
Rio Scharf, an attorney with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, who represents Cadwallader and other clients facing similar debt burdens, characterizes the system as "high pain and low gain."
"It results in very little additional revenue, but it causes a variety of pretty severe consequences for the people that it does impact," Scharf said. "For people who lack the funds to pay, they are hit with enormous financial penalties that punish them at a rate that is really pretty exceptional, even compared to how we punish people for failure to pay in the traffic court system or the criminal court system."
The SPUR report comes as the MTC and the Bay Area Toll Authority, or BATA, an MTC sister agency that manages toll revenue and FasTrak, have taken the first steps to lighten the burden of toll penalties. As part of a new equity action plan adopted earlier this year, BATA recently voted to sharply cut late-payment fines and fees and take other steps, such as reducing the cost of getting and using a FasTrak toll tag.
This week, a BATA committee will discuss further steps, such as how to create payment plans for those with high levels of toll debt.
Under a series of measures approved by Bay Area voters over the last three decades, bridge tolls pay for ongoing maintenance of the region's seven state-owned bridges and serve as a source of funding for billions of dollars of other highway, transit and transportation needs around the region. Toll penalties have been imposed, in large part, to guarantee revenue needed to repay bonds issued to fund those projects.
The penalty system
The penalty system works like this: When drivers cross one of those seven bridges, they're charged a $6 toll. Drivers can pay with a FasTrak toll tag or a FasTrak license plate account, both of which require registration and a prepaid balance.
If drivers don't have a FasTrak account set up, cameras capture their license plate numbers and send an invoice to each vehicle's registered address. (When this cashless toll system took effect at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, every crossing generated a separate invoice, resulting in a blizzard of notices sent to non-FasTrak users. Now, the system generates just one invoice per vehicle per month.)
Drivers currently have three weeks to pay their toll invoices. But under the system that had been in place before the recent BATA changes, failure to pay on time would result in a $25 penalty for each bridge crossing on the invoice. For example, paying late for 10 bridge trips would result in $250 in late penalties plus the original $60 in tolls owed, for a total of $310.
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November 09, 2021 at 09:00PM
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'High Pain, Low Gain': How Bridge Toll Penalties Pile Debt on Lower-Income Drivers - KQED
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