The Price Of Zoom
Posted on | August 18, 2008 at 7:07 am | 1 Comment
Pet Peeve of the Day: Bureaucracy.
This is a followup to my earlier post(s) about getting a Hybrid HOV Exemption – a permit that lets me drive my Prius in the HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes in Colorado during rush hour even though there is no one else in the car. Woo hoo! I finally finished the necessary steps to make this a reality! It was a bit of a chore though. I don’t think the State of Colorado has really got their act together on this thing yet, though they seem to be trying. I think it caught a lot of government people off guard and now they’re scrambling to handle it. Let me tell my tale, so that others may benefit from my experience.
You may recall that when we last left this topic, I had been granted the permit but would not get the decal until I signed up for and received an ExpressToll transponder. This was needed because the HOV lanes on I-25 are also HOT (High Occupancy Toll) lanes during rush hour and require a transponder to enter. I argued over the phone with a CDOT (Colorado Dept of Transportation) employee that I shouldn’t have to get that, since I was only going to use the permit for Santa Fe Drive and not I-25, which I rarely if ever use during rush hour. I balked about giving them my credit card info and paying the $35 that one must keep in the ExpressToll transponder account. My arguing did no good – if I wanted the decal, I had to get the transponder.
Okay. Fine. I went to the website and tried to sign up for the transponder. It gave me an error saying it was unable to create the account and to call customer service. I called customer service but got a busy signal. Fine. I decided to try again later in a few days. The very next day, I arrived home and checked my mail, and lo & behold someone had sent me a transponder. The documentation had an account number on it. I went to the website and logged onto that account, and it had all my information already (except my payment/credit card info). I guess that’s why it couldn’t create the account the day before – it was already there. So I entered my cc info and said they could extract that $35 from it. Then I patiently waited for them to send me the actual HOV Exemption decal to put on my car.
Weeks passed. I called customer service and actually got through to someone. Although that someone didn’t know what to do. The problem is that this whole thing is basically being administered by two different authorities: CDOT and the E-470/ExpressToll authority. And they don’t seem to talk to each other very well. The ExpressToll person told me that I should just wait and see if the decal shows up, and to call back later if it didn’t. Well, another week or so went by and there was no decal. So I called back. The person I got that time knew a little bit more about it and she told me I needed to call CDOT and talk to the person I originally talked to about the whole transponder issue.
So I called the person at CDOT and explained what was going on. She verified that I had the permit and said she would e-mail my name over to ExpressToll to check and make sure I had the transponder account setup. If that came back positive, she would send out the decal the next day. While I had her on the line, I asked how come I had gotten a transponder in the mail (and a pre-configured account for it) when I didn’t even sign up for one. She said they had so many people who were granted the permits and didn’t already have transponders and didn’t understand the whole transponder thing, that they decided to just send the transponders out without waiting for people to sign up for them on their own. Nice of them to tell us that. And so why didn’t they just send out the decals at the same time? I guess they had to make sure that the transponder account would have money in it. But obviously there was nothing in the ExpressToll system to notify CDOT once of these Hybrid HOV cars had their account finalized, even though the ExpressToll system definitely knows that the account has a Hybrid HOV exemption (the ExpressToll CSR I talked to said I was identified in the system as such).
The other thing she told me is that they had so many people who signed up for these that if anyone fails to setup their transponder account in a timely manner, they cancel the permit and award it to the next person on the waiting list. Or the next person in the exemption lottery or whatever. (There’s a finite number of permits they’re authorizing – I think it’s 2000.) Again, nice of them to tell us this. Since communication between the two departments isn’t too great, then if I had not taken matters into my own hands and kept pestering people, I would have lost my permit without even knowing it.
So, everything must have checked out okay because a few days later I finally received the decal in the mail. But here’s where it gets dumb again. The decal is a huge round red one, and the sticky part is on the back, not on the printed side like the usual window decals. The placement instructions said to put the decal on the driver’s side windshield, side mirror, or front bumper. What? The mirror and front bumper are pretty curved and I’m not sure it would stick real well. Plus it would simultaneously look too weird and be somewhat invisible, since both the sticker and my car color are reddish. So that left me with the windshield, but of course I had to put it on the outside. (Note that I also had to attach the transponder, which goes on the inside of the windshield near the rear view mirror. Yeah, I know I could’ve left it off, but what if I really did want to use I-25 during rush hour? Or take E-470 somewhere?)
So now I have this big old sticker on the outside of the window on the driver’s side, right above the emissions exception sticker, which is on the inside. It was raining today, which made me worry about the hand-written decal number on the sticker washing off. (I’ve photoshopped out the decal number in the photo, because I’m über paranoid about things like that, so that’s why it looks a little empty.) I also worried about the windshield wiper gradually peeling back the sticker, since it does make audible contact. I didn’t think about that when I put the sticker there.
So… how does it work? Is it worth it? I tried it out Friday when I drove on Santa Fe from work to my dad’s nursing home during rush hour. It was great. I think it shaved 5-10 minutes off my drive. However, I kept waiting for a cop to show up and pull me over and make me prove to him that I could legitimately use that lane. Which would be awkward and would negate the time savings. But there weren’t any cops out there Friday. One problem I did not anticipate is my own feelings of guilt and insecurity. When speeding down that lane passing everyone, I was afraid all the people stuck in the slow right lanes would be looking at me, thinking I was in that lane illegally, and going “What an asshole!” In fact, I know they are doing that because I used to be that person, cussing out every car I saw driving in that lane in rush hour with only one passenger in it. I know I shouldn’t care what other people think about me, but that’s really going to bug me anyway. Although in some ways, it’s nice to be the asshole for once. I do hope that CDOT can get the word out about this so that I don’t have to feel so weird about it. But I think CDOT has its hands full right now.
But yeah… it was worth it.
Latre.
Comments
One Response to “The Price Of Zoom”
August 18th, 2008 @ 4:57 pm
> looking at me, thinking I was in that lane illegally, and going “What an asshole!”
With each new day, I”m freshly amazed at how many of life’s problems can be solved with an inflatable woman…