When John Safran sold his Toyota Highlander three years ago, he kept his FasTrak transponder and put it in his new car.
“I sold the car, took the transponder, and went on my merry way,” Safran said.
Safran continued paying his FasTrak bills as they came in. But after a few months, he noticed something was off.
“I realized, this is getting excessive,” Safran said.
Safran was being billed for crossing the Golden Gate Bridge when he wasn’t. He reached out to FasTrak.
“I called them and said, ‘Listen, I have my transponder, there’s no way my transponder is picking up that many trips across the bridge,’” Safran said. “And they said, ‘No, but this license plate is.'”
That license plate was to his old car. That car was crossing the bridge without a transponder, so FasTrak was reading the plates and billing Safran. Why? FasTrak thought Safran still owned the car, since he didn’t tell FasTrak he’d sold it.
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“FasTrak is associated with a person who has an account, but your vehicle license plate is also associated with FasTrak,” said Randy Rentschler, a FasTrak spokesperson. “So when you sell your vehicle to somebody else, as far as we’re concerned at FasTrak, that license plate is still you unless you tell us otherwise.”
That’s helpful knowledge for anyone who uses FasTrak. Ultimately, Safran told FasTrak the date he sold his car. And FasTrak calculated how many crossings he’d been incorrectly billed: 156. That came to $800. Safran was excited when FasTrak told him his refund was on the way.
“They said, ‘Within 48 hours this will be processed,’” Safran said.
But then Safran hit another bump in the road.
“That was three years ago,” Safran said. “Forty-eight hours obviously came and went.”.
Safran never got his refund. He says he called FasTrak several times but never got help.
“Every time I cross that bridge I curse them, and I just want it resolved,” Safran said. “I always wanted it resolved, but I was exhausted.”
So Safran reached out to us. We reached out to FasTrak and it admitted that Safran should have been refunded long ago.
“We didn’t do our job on the public side,” said Rentschler. “And we kind of needed to be woken up, and I think this newscast is going to wake us up a little bit.”
Safran got his refund and is happy to finally put this behind him. And FasTrak wants all drivers to learn from his story.
“Everyone out there - let FasTrak know if you acquire a new vehicle or sell your old one,” said Rentschler.
FasTrak doesn’t know if the person who bought Safran’s car was intentionally avoiding paying the tolls and passing the buck to Safran. But it does know this: it loses $2.5 million a year - on the Golden Gate Bridge alone - from drivers who dodge paying tolls by removing their plates or covering them up.
