RVing the toll-infested East Coast? You'll want to know about these EZ Pass updates!
We launched back on the road during difficult circumstances. This was the first year that our full-time RV life wasn't voluntary. We had rented a house for the winter, but we broke the lease after quickly realizing it didn't fit our and our pets' needs. This led us to endure a full winter in our 3-season aluminum trailer, stationary, in Massachusetts. Some winters in southern New England are fairly mild, and we get no more than a few small snowstorms and cold blasts. This was not one of those years. The region was hit with historic snowfall that left us snowed in for several weeks. As soon as we had a thaw, we geared up to hit the road for an unexpected additional year of nomadic life.
Unfortunately, the road didn't grant us the reprieve we needed, and it ended up being a tough travel season – so tough, that we spontaneously called it quits in the middle of South Carolina, got off the road, and rented a cottage in a state we never planned on living in. Obviously, a lot had to happen for us to reach that point, and it wasn't anything necessarily big, but rather lots of small annoyances and hazards that eventually made us give up.
One of the smallest annoyances was that, on our way out of New England, our EZ Pass toll transponder stopped reading. Anyone who's traveled the Northeast knows that we have a ridiculous number of tolls. In transportation lingo, the region has the highest "toll burden," or number of tolls per mile driven. Some RVers spend years debating whether or not a transponder is worthwhile. We, however, had ours for years before we got our RV, and we continued using it even when towing our trailer. The EZ Pass has 2 main benefits, the best being that the price is lower for those with the pass. The other benefit is that there are express lanes for passholders only, like the Department of Transportation is trying to make the road network into an amusement park. Worst amusement park ever.
Once we realized the issue was indeed with our transponder, and not with any specific toll reader, we knew we'd be rolling without our EZ Pass for a while. Luckily, since our truck's license plate is registered to our EZ Pass account (which we share with Nicole's family so we can all use the MA address), pay-by-plate usually links up with our account. Everything is computerized, so the reader captures our license plate and registers it as a number associated with a pass. Then it charges us the pass rate instead of the cash rate. They do this in case of a faulty read, which does happen from time to time.
We thought this solution was working well, until we got to FL. We had our mail forwarded from my SD nomad mailbox (where the truck and trailer are registered) to my parents' house. In the pile was a bill from the NJ DOT. One toll had read the trailer as a separate vehicle and billed us at a higher price. Since it had been weeks between the issuing of the bill and our receipt of it, the payment deadline was already past due. The letter said we owed the fee plus a $50 administrative charge. It took multiple emails and several hours of phone calls to get the charge removed, including one instance where they assured me things were taken care of, but another bill arrived weeks later. Ah, the government.
Once this happened, we realized that doing the retroactive pay-by-plate/account check might be more hassle than it's worth. Wanting to get a new pass ASAP, we had Nicole's dad, the account holder, contact Mass DOT to try and get a replacement. They told him we'd have to go in person and get the transponder tested before we're issued a replacement. There was another option, to mail the old one back in a foil pouch with a letter that it stopped working, but due to miscommunications, we weren't aware of this option. Even had we known, we had no way to time the arrival of a replacement EZ Pass to an address, since we were still traveling at a fairly quick pace. We figured we'd need to wait until we were back in MA to get a new pass, which meant we'd be without a transponder for several months.
From then on, we relied on pay-by-plate for the cashless roads, and switched to using the cash toll lanes for the roads that are still manned. This meant we paid the higher price at these tolls, and had to wait in the "slow lanes" instead of zipping through the EZ Pass Express lanes.
Since we made the big transition into our cottage, our toll road travel was less than it might have been, but we still had our summer New England trip, back to the region of high "toll burden." We tried to find out if there was anywhere more convenient we could get a new EZ Pass than the official MA customer service centers. We kept reading things that said you can get them at AAA, or even buy one (called "EZ Pass On the Go") at participating grocery stores. It's right there on the website:
Unfortunately, MA loves to make things extra complicated. We still have to buy the transponder in our own state, and in MA, only AAA and the RMV sell them. Problem is, these locations won't sell you a pass without linking it to an account right away, but they don't have access to existing accounts! In other words, we could only buy one that way if we wanted to create a new account.
After researching in circles, we were back to our original plan: head to the service center in person once we were back in MA. But then things got even more complicated, when I discovered that the info I received from customer service was already outdated. Starting in March, states' Departments of Transportation began rolling out new transponders, switching from the old plastic ones to RFID stickers. When I got my information, the switch had already been made in MA, but it wasn't reflected on any of the customer service policies or documentation. Turns out, because the plastic transponders were being phased out, sending the transponder back to be tested wasn't even a thing anymore! We could have just tossed our old device and requested a new one online!
Due to the miscommunications between the Mass DOT and customers, which led to further miscommunications between us and Nicole's dad, we gave up trying to get our transponder before we left MA. We had other problems that took priority, anyway. At least now, we were fairly certain we could just order a pass online and either get it sent to SC directly, or have it sent to the account-holder address and then have Nicole's dad forward it to us. This did mean, however, that we did our entire New England trip without our pass, therefore slow-rolling through the cash lanes. On a positive note, we had some really entertaining interactions with the toll workers! We suppose it's not every day they see 2 adults, 2 cats, and a dog go through with their very unique looking trailer. One worker on the Garden State Parkway had us laughing when he exclaimed, "Wow, you've got your whole home back there! Pretty cool!" Then when we went to give us our change, noticed the cats, both of whom were riding copilot in the front of the truck: "Aww, hey kitties, what's going on?" This was just one interaction of many, and all the toll workers we encountered were extremely nice – it couldn't have been easy for them to muster smiles and make conversation in the sweltering summer heat.
Our cat copilots
Once we got back to SC, I went back online to finally order the EZ Pass sticker, and it was surprisingly easy – so easy that boy do I wish I had done it sooner! The only downside was that, yes, we did in fact need to mail it to the account holder, and so we had the extra step of getting it forwarded from the Andersons. Soon, though, we had our new decal in-hand.
We wish this is where the story ends, but we have an added complication. We tow a trailer. With our plastic transponder, we always just hoped the tolls would accurately count the axles and charge us accordingly. We do have both the truck and trailer registered on the account. Most of the time, it works fine. However, Mass Dot actually tells RVers to get 2 separate transponders – one for just the truck and one for the combined rig – and switch the rig transponder in on travel days with the RV. You just need to make sure the one that isn't in-use won't accidentally be read, so it needs to go into a foil or other RFID-blocking pouch.
But now, the stickers are permanently affixed to the windshield, and people have taken notice of the many issues this causes.
Turns out we as RVers weren't the only ones scratching our heads.
At the time of writing this blog post, the MA DOT website hasn't been updated to reflect that having 2 transponders for a towable isn't possible anymore. We'll just add that to the very long list of reasons we deemed this state the least RV-friendly back in 2022 and it's held that accolade ever since. The website says that, if you're towing a trailer in MA, you're fine as long as the trailer is also registered to your account. But out-of-state, if you don't have a dedicated transponder (which now with the stickers, you can't), you're supposed to go to a staffed lane to have them "reclassify the transaction." But what about the roads that are unstaffed and cashless? On these roads, we'd have to rely on the plates being accurately read anyway!
The only somewhat-viable workaround we've seen is to purchase an electrostatic cling film to make the stickers removable, but then people need to still carefully place the non-used transponder in some sort of RFID-blocking folder (like a Passport case) and somehow not mess up the cling film during the switch. While it might be a good option for some, for us it sounds more tedious than just hoping pay-by-plate registers the correct number of axles. After all, that's what we used to do with our old transponder, anyway.
If you're part of the RV community, you've probably heard of alternative options for transponders that work nationally, the most popular being the Innovative Toll Solution by Open Roads. These transponders are supposed to work everywhere in the lower 48, as opposed to our EZ Pass that only works in 20 states on the eastern side of the US. When our EZ Pass stopped working, we looked into Open Roads to see if their solution would be a better option. After all, we could just order one and receive it as soon as we knew which address to send it to. But a few comments on forums made us question if the transponders actually work everywhere they claim, which is basically everywhere non-cash options are accepted, except the Mackinac Bridge. However, users have said that some regional toll authorities, like in North Texas, don't honor it. This little blip wouldn't matter much to us, but as we did more research, we discovered that their innovative solution wasn't the solution for us. The transponder requires a setup fee and an annual fee. Plus, the tolls are billed at the pay-by-plate rate, which is typically higher than the passholder rate. We calculated that having the Open Roads transponder would cost us more than not having any toll pass at all, and significantly more in the Northeast than having our EZ Pass. And since we're most toll burdened in the Northeast, the EZ Pass was still the clear solution for us, and the Open Roads pass was a hard pass.
If you're thinking about getting the Open Roads transponder, our advice is to do the math, because you might be spending more to have the transponder than not. This might be worth the cost, though, if you want the efficiency and convenience of being able to skip cash lanes. For us, the answer was clear: stick with the EZ Pass, and hope that our one transponder will work, no matter how many axles we're traveling on. And as for our fellow EZ Pass-owning RVers: Stay aware that this transponder switch is happening. You might need to adjust the way you tow through tolls as a result.
