Japan’s expressways require drivers to pay a toll to use them, but at least they have a pretty slick payment system. Rather than having to stop at toll both and fiddle with change to pay to an attendant or feed into a machine, the vast majority of drivers make their payments through an ETC (electronic toll collection) card. The system works wirelessly – simply slow down (but don’t stop) as you approach the toll gate, and once your card’s signal is read, the gates will automatically rise and you motor on through. The same process happens when you get off the expressway, with the distance-derived toll then billed to your account.
▼ Japan’s expressway ETC system in action
At least, that’s how things usually go. April 8 and most of April 9 were expectations, though, as the ETC system went down at around 12:30 a.m. on April 8 and wasn’t up and running again until 2 p.m. on April 9, affecting 106 toll gates on the Tomei and Chuo Expressways in Tokyo and the prefectures of Kanagawa, Yamanashi, Nagano, Shizuoka, Aichi, Gifu, and Mie. With the system unable to read driver’s cards and automatically raise/lower the toll gates, expressway operator Central Nippon Expressway Co, also known as NEXCO Central, made the decision to just open them all up and let cars pass through, keeping traffic flowing on some of Japan’s most-used motorways.
However, even though NEXCO Central waved cars through, it has no intention of waiving the tolls. Following the incident, the company stated that drivers who used the expressway while the ETC system was down are still required to pay the full amount of the toll that they would have ordinarily been charged. In a statement regarding the situation on April 9, NEXCO Central president Tadashi Nawada said: “There are situations listed within the [ETC] terms of service in which drivers do not have to pay the toll fees, but there is no clause that drivers do not have to pay in the event of what can be called system malfunctions, as was the case here.”
It’s not always easy to get people to pay for something after they’ve already extracted the benefits from it and returned home, but NEXCO Central says that by 10 p.m. on April 8, they’d received offers of payment from roughly 24,000 people. That’s admirably scrupulous of them, and given that everyone getting on the expressway in Japan already expects to be charged for it, it’s not like they’re getting hit with an expense they didn’t think they would.
On the other hand, NEXCO Central estimates that there were around 920,000 ETC-equipped cars driving around the expressways during the system outage. It’s unclear whether or not all of those cars were traveling within the affected areas of the network, but it’s a safe bet that more than 24,000 cars got waved through a toll gate without their ETC card being read and thus without being charged.
Those who don’t offer to pay could potentially be accused of defrauding NEXCO Central, but they might not necessarily be twirling their villainous mustaches as they chuckle about pulling one over on the company. A large part of the appeal of the ETC system is its convenience. Toll calculation and billing is automatic, and if you have your ETC account linked to your credit card or bank account with automatic payment enabled, there’s nothing you have to do on your end. So being asked to compute your toll yourself (which would also require you to figure out how kilometers you drove along the 17 routes of the expressway network that were affected), then set up a bank transfer for that amount to be sent to NEXCO Central, is a hassle that a lot of people aren’t enthusiastically volunteering for, even though NEXCO Central says it is covering any associated bank fees.
Ironically, the reason for the outage that’s resulted in drivers being asked to submit payments appears to have been an unexpected error that occurred during a system update to prepare for discounted late-night tolls, which are scheduled to go into effect this summer.
As for how NEXCO Central would go about tracking down non-payers without any ETC records for the period to refer to, ostensibly they could examine security camera images to determine the location where cars got on and off the expressway. With 900,000 vehicles to track, though, that seems like it would be a major undertaking, and the company isn’t currently threatening any legal action, but as of this writing it’s also not made any indication that it plans to officially wave the tolls either.
Source: Mainichi Shimbun via Yahoo! Japan News via Hachima Kiko, Norimono News
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