Don't be dumb like me - attach your e-tag to your windscreen

Toll roads are a part of daily life if you live in a city like Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane.

In fact, it can feel like there’s no way around these roads that we have to pay to use, just to get where we need to be.

This is the case for hundreds of thousands of road users on a daily basis - you take the toll road to work, because you’ll spend more money on fuel (and lose more money on time) if you don’t.

You probably know that tolls are expensive. It’s not difficult to rack up as much as $30 in tolls in Sydney, just to get from out west to the inner west by avoiding the clusterfluff that is Parramatta Road. That’s $30 one-way!

But you know what makes it an ever harder pill to swallow? Being hit twice by tolls. As I have been. For years now...

It’s all because I didn’t attach my e-tag to my windscreen. You would think that toll-road operators are getting their fair share of your money by charging you to use the roads, but did you know they also charge you a fee if you don’t have your tag visible?

Yep, even if you have the tag in the car, and you have your number plates registered to your account, you can cop an additional fee on top of the toll.

Depending on where you live (and which motorway you’re using), the “vehicle matching fee”, or “LPN fee”, can be as high as $0.92.

The cost, according to the toll-road operators, is to cover the 'human handling' of matching a photo of the car’s numberplates to the account against which they are registered. I asked a spokesperson for the NSW toll-road operator, Transurban, about the cost, and why it is passed on to the user.

I was told there is a team of people who sit and manually input these photographs against the accounts. Now, I would have thought camera technology was smart enough to have plate recognition that could automatically match the plate to the account, without any human handling. But apparently that’s not the case.

Put simply: the cameras that read your plates as you enter a Westfield carpark are smarter than the ones on a multi-million dollar toll-road.

The LPN fee isn’t only charged when you don’t have your tag on the windscreen - it will be charged if you have insufficient funds, or if the tag itself fails.

I've rectified the issue, having attached my tag to my windscreen. I know, I know - it was dumb of me to leave it off for so long, and knowing what I know now, it'll be affixed with adhesive stronger than super glue. 

For some context, I managed to amass 20x$0.75 LPN fees on the M7 (totalling $15.00), and 40x$0.55 LPN fees on the M4 ($22.00)... and that was just in the period from March to May!

So, in addition to the hundreds of bucks down the drain just to use the roads, I could well have spent more than a hundred bucks a year on LPN fees.

Here’s a breakdown, as of June 2018, of what each of the toll-roads across Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales will charge you if you don’t have your pass attached to the windscreen.

Sydney

M2 (Hills M2 Motorway	$0.55
M4 (The New M4)	$0.55
M5 (M5 South-West Motorway)	$0.55
M7 (Westlink M7)	$0.75
Cross City Tunne	$0.55
Eastern Distributor	$0.55
Lane Cove Tunnel	$0.55
Military Road e-ramps	$0.55
Sydney Harbour Bridge	$0.55
Sydney Harbour Tunnel	$0.55

Melbourne

CityLink	$0.75
Eastlink	$0.29

Brisbane

Airportlink M7	$0.92
Clem 7	$0.47
Gateway Motorway	$0.47
Go Between Bridge	$0.47
Legacy Way Tunne	$0.47
Logan Motorway	$0.47
Sir Leo Hielscher Bridges	$0.47

Tell us your feelings about toll roads - let us know what you think about them in the comments section below.