ORLANDO, Fla. – A request for a year’s worth of data has revealed thousands of toll drivers have either closed their SunPass accounts or switched to a different toll provider.
News 6 asked both the Florida Department of Transportation and the Central Florida Expressway Authority for a monthly breakdown of both SunPass and E-PASS accounts over the past year.
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FDOT would not provide a monthly breakdown, but in August, the agency did confirm that during the SunPass system upgrade failure this summer, more than 36,000 SunPass customers closed their accounts. However, customers opened more than 1 million new accounts during the exact same time period.
CFX did provide data from between August 2017 to August 2018 for both the number of accounts opened and closed. The data shows a more than 80 percent spike in new customer accounts from year to year, and only a slight uptick in account closures. E-PASS works on all tolls in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, and CFX says they currently have more than 400,000 customers.
[DATA: New, closed E-PASS accounts as of Oct. 2]
Do they think the SunPass upgrade failure had any effect on those numbers?
“We have no hard data to back that up or say for sure, but yes, empirically, it is safe to assume that a decent portion of the bump in new E-PASS registrations is likely related to disgruntled former SunPass customers switching to E-PASS,” said Brian Hutchings, senior communications specialist at Central Florida Expressway Authority. “I think it would be a stretch to say, however, that is the only reason for the bump in numbers. I would hope that our marketing and outreach efforts have also contributed significantly to that boost.”
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Despite multiple calls and emails, FDOT has not yet responded to News 6's latest request for information on when Toll-by-Plate customers will receive their bills from this summer. A call to SunPass customer service officials confirms the last time Toll-by-Plate customers received a bill was back in May.
See a full breakdown of the account openings and closures below.