NRA to waive €3 toll fines

THE NATIONAL Roads Authority (NRA) is to waive its "first round" fines for late payments of barrier-free toll charges on Dublin's M50, as a "gesture of consideration" for motorists who failed to register their vehicles by last Friday's deadline.

Under the NRA's complex payment structure, motorists who failed to register or pay a €3 fee, would have been getting bills this week for the €3 charge, plus a €3 first-round fine. However, the NRA has now decided to waive its entitlement to the €3 fine, for motorists who pay the €3 charge by September 14th.

The NRA will send letters containing a special barcode to affected motorists, which may be brought to branded M50 Payzone outlets by motorists when paying the charge.

The NRA insisted the waiver was simply "best practice in customer service to allow people to get used to new arrangements" and not a reflection of any "teething troubles".

Early analysis of the system by the NRA has shown a number of difficulties - some of them systematic and some ascribed to motorist error. Some tags operating on the new M50 barrier-free toll system at the West-Link, for example, would not operate at other toll plazas such as the M4 at Enfield and the M1 at Drogheda, when motorists arrived at those places.

The NRA conceded some tags had suffered delays of 10 hours before they were working efficiently at the different toll facilities. The Irish Times understands there was an additional difficulty with new tags failing at the M1 toll plaza last Saturday, with staff claiming full details of 50,000 new tag holders had "not been sent over" from the NRA's "eFlow" system. However, the NRA said it was "unaware" of any such situation.

The NRA analysis of the launch showed:

• Of the first 120,000 eFlow customers - 75,000 vehicles had fixed tags, while the remaining 45,000 had registered for payments without tags.

• Some vehicles had been registered twice by mistake. A spokesman said this would typically occur where couples each registered their own and their partners' vehicles.

• Some drivers did not place the tags correctly, leading to misreadings. Some motorists waved the tags out the window of their vehicles.

• Some drivers failed to confirm they had received a tag in order to render it operational.

The NRA has asked customers to bear in mind that it is an electronic system and that with different operators and tag manufacturers "some tags are going to have problems".