“Actual” stoplight camera footage.
Nobody ever said that bucking convention would be easy or necessarily cost free. We always knew that travelers typically pay more for all kinds of things. But when you travel full-time like we do, those extra charges become something akin to a lifestyle tax.
Some of the penalties travelers pay are in-your-face obvious, like the two-tiered pricing systems used in many places around the world. There’s one price for local residents and a different, higher price for visitors. Other penalties are less obvious, like the way it is more expensive to rent a car at an airport than in town or the way hotel rooms are taxed more highly than just about anything else you buy.
Travelers are even sometimes targeted by law enforcement for special treatment like we were in Fort Collins, CO.
Plenty of other penalties aren’t even deliberate. They arise from the fact that our square-peg lifestyle doesn’t always fit neatly into the round hole designed for everyone else. And that’s certainly the case with one particularly annoying trap that caught us most recently. Ironically it’s something that is designed to make life easier. And for everyone else it almost certainly does. But to us it is the most hateful innovation of all time: the automated traffic toll.
Admission to Tikal National Park in Guatemala is 6 times more expensive for extranjeros (foreigners) than for nationals.
Don’t get me wrong. When I lived in New York I absolutely loved the Northeast’s Easy-Pass automatic toll system. The little box I stuck to my windshield let me bypass toll booths at highway speed. Before that you had to stop every five miles or so on the Garden State Parkway to throw 50 cents in a collection basket (yeah, the GSP really was that annoying).
Building on a good thing, many places extended the automated toll service to every driver on the road regardless of whether they had a pass for the car or not. In many places you no longer have the option of stopping and paying at a booth. An “Eye in the Sky” reads your license plate and sends you a bill by mail. With this in place there is no need for anyone to stop and pay a toll ever again, and it’s bloody awful.
Our problem is that we’re rarely in any one place long enough for our snail mail to catch up with us. When we were traveling in the U.S. we’d typically get mail forwarded to us about once per month. Now that we’re traveling internationally, it’s harder to find places to receive our mail and we’ve been going more like three months between deliveries. By the time we get our mail, these unexpected bills are already overdue and accruing usurious late fees.
Because just letting me pay the increased amount now would be too easy.
We first encountered this dreaded bill by mail scheme in Florida about three years ago. That case eventually devolved into calls from bill collectors trying to retrieve our $1.15 toll (and $75 in fees). Of course nobody cared that the original bill hadn’t even been sent to us until a year after we left Florida. They just knew it was 15 months past due.
More recently we received a €90 citation for presumably running a red light somewhere in France. I don’t recall doing it, but shit does sometimes happen. Whether I rolled through the light or not I figure I’ll just suck it up and pay. Only I can’t. The original bill is now more than 90 days past due, and I’m told I can no longer pay it with the invoice number I have. I need to wait for a new one to arrive . . . in the mail.
But here’s the thing; that new bill was presumably sent on August 12, 2014. It’s now a month later, and my mail forwarding company says they still haven’t received it. We know that our first bill also took more than a month to arrive.
If that sounds unusually slow, even for snail mail, that’s because it is. It typically takes about a week for us to have mail sent between Europe and the U.S. In this case it sounds like the French are slow-walking our invoices; essentially guaranteeing we’ll pay late.
We even tried calling to see if we could pay over the phone or at least get the new invoice number so that we could pay what we owe online. We explained our mail situation and that we may never get the letter in time for us to pay. “Sorry,” we were told “it is impossible for you to pay now. It is our procedure that you wait for your new bill. You could try sending a letter to L’officer du ministere public and explain your situation.”
And how, we asked, would we get a response from them? “By mail, of course.”
Why are they making it so difficult for us to pay? Maybe because our €90 citation has already skyrocketed to €375, including the late fees we know about. I can’t imagine how much we’ll eventually have to pay when our next bill arrives, assuming it does. The one thing we know for sure, though, is that bucking the status quo rarely comes cheap.