After grace period, law enforcement ready to crack down on I-405 cheaters

There will be at least one way to cheat the new I-405 tolling system starting Sunday, but law enforcement guarantees it will be looking for violators.

Drivers will be tolled in the new express lanes, unless their car is outfitted with an activated Flex Pass switched to HOV mode. Vehicles traveling in the HOV lane with fewer than three people will be violating the law, but there won’t be any way for the system to make the distinction.

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That’s where the Washington State Patrol comes in, trooper Mark Francis says. After enough practice, law enforcement gets pretty good at determining the number of occupants in a vehicle, he tells KIRO Radio traffic reporter Chris Sullivan.

“When you start doing it enough, you get pretty good at it. You can get angles of headlights, streetlights coming into the vehicle to get a good snapshot of what’s in the vehicle,” Francis said, “For [drivers] it’s going to be a learning curve. For us, it’s going to be a learning curve as well to figure out the nuances of how to enforce.”

Drivers have questioned how troopers can even see into a car, especially with tinted windows. Well, if they can’t see into the vehicle, that could be a violation right there &#8212 too much tint.

Trooper Francis also expects to see a lot of people entering the toll lanes outside of the designated areas.

“I assume we’re going to have a lot of people who will cross those double-white lines where they’re not supposed to and we’ll have a lot of people in the HOV lane with two people when there are supposed to be three people,” he explained.

Francis says drivers will get about a month-long grace period to figure it all out, before troopers drop the hammer.

“Even though we want to be educating mostly for the first few weeks, first few months; if people are egregiously trying to beat the system or trying unsafely getting out of the way of these cameras, you can expect some enforcement on that,” he said.

But is the enforcement doomed to fail? That’s the position of the union representing the troopers. It says the troopers have no place to pull people over on the busy I-405 and have no chance to catch violators. The union claims enforcement of the HOT lanes on Highway 167 has ended for those same reasons.

Trooper Francis says that just isn’t true. He plans to enforce the laws as best he can. Other troopers will too.