Thousands of drivers along the Dulles Toll Road and the Powhite Parkway Extension will either be reimbursed for $25 tickets or won’t have to pay the fines after state officials determined the citations had been issued in error.
“We started getting calls from customers that they were receiving violation notices after they had thrown their change in the toll,” Virginia Department of Transportation spokeswoman Joan Morris said. “Looking at the data, there was definitely a glitch.”
The department dismissed all 8,000 tickets issued between February and May and will return a total of $105,000 to drivers, Morris said.
The rest of the fines hadn’t been paid yet.
The department blamed the bogus tickets on a new automated camera computer system that it installed at the end of January.
“We did a review of the system, and it showed that the toll collection system wasn’t properly filtering out questionable or suspect violations,” Morris said.
That included times when a toll machine is jammed and does not register a payment. The department developed new filtering logic to increase its confidence in the system’s ticketing data, spokeswoman Shannon Marshall said.
“Rather than go through these one by one, we made a proactive decision to return those fees for the time period from February through May. So probably, more people got the refund than should have, but we decided it was the right thing to do,” she said.
VDOT uses toll money to fund maintenance and improvement projects for the toll roads. Morris said she does not anticipate that the refund will affect any projects.
