Toll By Plate - A Unique Challenge for RVers!

How about this line of thought..... (of course it don't work for everyone).

Toll roads and in fact all the super highways be they tollways or freewways are about getting from here to there in a hurry...

RV lifestyle is .. the exact opposite.. it's about stopping and smelling the flowers.

Take the road less traveled.

Ductape wrote:
I despise toll roads, but where they exist I prefer toll by plate. No slowing or stopping and what's hard about receiving a bill in the mail?

nothing if you get your mail at a sticks and bricks house every day. A little more difficult to be timely when you are paying to have your mail forwarded each time but you don't know how often to have it forwarded because you have no idea when the bill will arrive at the mail forwarding service.

ljr wrote:

WTP-GC wrote:

HadEnough wrote:

As I travel from place to place, they snap my plate and that's that. I have no way of getting information on what be I owe. They do not contact you at your mailing address, nothing. Actually, Massachusetts did send a bill to my mailing address, but that's it.

How does anyone know what they owe and who they owe if they are a traveler?

If they got your a clear picture of your plate, you will get a bill. Might take a month. Might take 3 months. But you will get a bill.

The DMV told me I was required by law to use my street address on my registration. The Post Office doesn’t deliver to that address. I’ve probably got a bunch of outstanding bills but I don’t know how to pay them.

If you get stopped for a traffic violation in that state, you will have the opportunity to pay all of them at once. :S

wa8yxm wrote:
How about this line of thought..... (of course it don't work for everyone).

Toll roads and in fact all the super highways be they tollways or freewways are about getting from here to there in a hurry...

RV lifestyle is .. the exact opposite.. it's about stopping and smelling the flowers.

Take the road less traveled.

That's exactly what I do when I head out of IL. I'll take the back roads that travel at 55mph with very little slowing down. Just leaving from my house in the NW burbs of Chicago with my trailer would cost me about $15 one way. That's $30 for a round trip to WI or IA! Do that 2 or 3 trips a year and it's pricey. And the back roads are less crazy than interstate Hwy's.

Toll roads around Denver have the same pay by plate and have gotten into no small amount of hot water over claiming to have mailed bills and then piling on the penalties when they don't get payment. We use them quite often so have an account that is tied to window stickers but had a problem when I changed credit cards in getting them to automatically replenish the pot. Fortunately I checked my account and caught it. I'm sure that they would have been quite happy to add on fines even with a valid CC on record.

When we first got to Colorado we had a few tolls on an out of state plate. I kept wondering when I'd get a bill and then 3-4 months later a bill shows up with an additional non payment fine. Never got a first bill. Amount was small so I just paid it. There are people who have had penalties in the thousands racked up and never got one bill. Big deal about this about a year ago and since then they appear to have cleaned up their act.

Caution is that these toll authorities seem pretty casual about actually sending out bills and are more than glad to keep adding penalties.

My fear is that the motorhome and toad both have stickers, and that I might find out I get charged twice - once for the motorhome + dolly and toad (4 axles) and once more for the toad. So far is seems that their system is smart enough to figure out when a second vehicle is being towed but I check every time - when we got to RMNP or points north, its a $40 toll bill, but DW does not want to go the free route on the 25 though downtown.

2chiefsRus wrote:

Ductape wrote:
I despise toll roads, but where they exist I prefer toll by plate. No slowing or stopping and what's hard about receiving a bill in the mail?

nothing if you get your mail at a sticks and bricks house every day. A little more difficult to be timely when you are paying to have your mail forwarded each time but you don't know how often to have it forwarded because you have no idea when the bill will arrive at the mail forwarding service.

what difference does it make? you have your mail forwarded to you every now and then whether it's on a regular sked like every Friday or irregularly. whatever mail has accumulated will be forwarded. if the bill takes 6-months to show up at your "home" so what? their problem, not yours.

SidecarFlip wrote:
We are fast becoming a cashless society.

It won't have much impact on RVers, many of us have been cashless for years. ;)

dodge guy wrote:


That's exactly what I do when I head out of IL. I'll take the back roads that travel at 55mph with very little slowing down. Just leaving from my house in the NW burbs of Chicago with my trailer would cost me about $15 one way. That's $30 for a round trip to WI or IA! Do that 2 or 3 trips a year and it's pricey. And the back roads are less crazy than interstate Hwy's.

So which back road would you suggest to get from your place to IN/MI?

I didn't read this whole thread. I just stay out of states that have toll roads. But, I never go far from home anyway so it's easy for me.

As for the toll both worker making 30k a year. That comes to about 15 bucks a hour. Do they really make that much ? Where can I find a nice cushy job that pays like that ?

NY has EZ-Pass will issue multiple boxes on one account and issue to out of state users. I may have paid for each unit, been to long, but there is no monthly fee and they put $25 in the shared account from your CC. When it gets below $10 they put in another $25, so worse case you have $34.99 in the account doing nothing. They send you an eMail each month if there has been activity telling you to log in for your statement listing all the tolls. You can register more plates than you have boxes and move them around if you want.

After moving out of NY it was 2 years before it was used again and I was nervous if it still worked, but it did.

We also skip interstates in general when we are on vacation or not in a hurry. We also skip the OH Turnpike if we are pulling a trailer, the extra charge gets it over 10 cents a mile and with the construction that is usually going on you can go faster on state roads.