It’s been three months since the start of tolling at the Elizabeth River Tunnels and the company in charge is still coming under fire for billing problems.
Cory Benjamin has received a bill for 10 trips through the Downtown Tunnel – trips he says he never took.
“I’m not going to pay for something I never done,” he says.
So when Benjamin called up Elizabeth River Crossings, he found out it was one of their employees that misread a camera image taken of someone else’s car.
“It should have been an F instead of an R,” Benjamin says.
But that wasn’t the end.
“A month or two after, another bill comes and I’m like what? The same thing. The same problem,” he says.
Benjamin is just one of hundreds of drivers who’ve complained to ERC about problems with toll bills.
The company has come under fire not just for their camera systems, but also for problems with the timeliness of E-ZPass transactions.
“The lag in billing… you don’t even know that you are incurring it,” says driver James Hughes.
Hughes says his Indiana E-ZPass account was finally billed 11 days after his trip through the Downtown Tunnel.
In comparison, a recent trip over the Coleman Bridge in Gloucester took one day to process.
And when he tried to call ERC…
“Yesterday, I spent one hour on the phone waiting for them to pick up,” he says.
Overwhelmed with heavy call volumes, the company admits they’ve had some problems with system error, especially when it comes to the camera images.
“The system has flaws. It should be fixed,” Benjamin says.
ERC tells NewsChannel 3 they’ve implemented additional training for customer service reps to ensure better reviews of license plates.
As for the E-ZPass billing issues, the company says that has been fixed and all transactions are now posting in real time.
