FasTrak Dyslexia

My wife recently received an invoice from Bay Area FasTrak for a toll violation. I had previously received a similar invoice from FasTrak after accidentally entering a freeway in the FasTrak lane in southern California, so I suspected that it happened to my wife as well. Personally I feel that the FasTrak freeway onramps should be more clearly labeled and optimized for nighttime visibility (that was when I unknowingly used FasTrak), but that’s a different topic altogether.

It turns out that upon inspecting the invoice, it claims that the toll violation occurred on Freeway 101 in the Bay Area (we were not in the area on the date of the alleged violation), and the photo evidence showed a vehicle make and model that is different than my wife’s Tesla. The resolution of the photo in the hardcopy invoice did not permit us to clearly see the license plate, but I was able to retrieve a digital version of the photo online (pictured above). It turns out that FasTrak system transposed 2 characters of the license plate which erroneously linked the toll evasion to my wife’s car. We submitted an online dispute, and this was a portion of their reply:

Thank you for contacting the Bay Area FasTrak Customer Service Center. I appreciate that you brought this issue to our attention, and I will process your dispute for violation ##### concerning the license plate numbered ABCDEFG.

I have reviewed the violation and the images associated, and found the license plate in the image is ABCEDFG. I can confirm this violaton has been dismissed and transferred to the correct vehicle. I apologize for any inconvenience or frustration this may have caused you. No further action or payment is required. If you need further assistance please contact the Bay Area FasTrak Customer Service Center at 1-877-BAY-TOLL (1-877-229-8655.)

I assume that FasTrak applies some sort of optical character recognition (OCR) technology to convert photo images into text-based license plate numbers. In my experience with OCR, it is common for images to be converted into the incorrect characters (e.g., incorrectly translating a photo of the number “1” into the letter “l” or vice versa). However, I’ve never seen an OCR error where a sequence of 7 characters are all correctly identified, but 2 of those characters have their positions incorrectly swapped—that seems to be what happened here.

In the end, I’m happy that the violation was dismissed, but it does highlight an opportunity for them to improve their technology, especially if they are going to be coming after people for money in a “guilty until proven innocent” manner.