Illinois tollway I-Pass remains festering dung

A recent road trip reminded me of the festering dung that is the Illinois Tollway.

1. Charging double for paying tolls with cash is outrageous.

2. Preserving I-Pass travel records indefinitely is a privacy problem.

3. Turning management over to the private company is a privacy problem.

4. When your I-Pass runs low, they email you. How helpful. They email you daily. Not helpful.

5. Why didn't I put more money on immediately? Because the online site has an invalid security certificate. My iPhone (my only internet access) couldn't tell me why, so I refused. When the I-Pass telephone option was available, when it was open I was in a public space and so reading my credit card number aloud was a bad idea. Upon returning home I confirmed that Firefox also hates getipass.com. Internet Explorer likes it. Conclusion: The people running getipass.com are typical "Internet Explorer is the Internet" idiots.

6. If there is construction in the few miles preceding a tollbooth, please do the human thing and close the tollbooth. Just put up signs "NO TOLL THIS STATION. USE LEFT LANES."

7. (Added later) Their web site will confirm usernames with bad passwords, making breaking into someone's I-Pass account a bit easier. I see you got a C- on Login Security 101, Illinois Tollway.

8. (Later yet): I can't enter my actual license plate number. Apparently the dash is too complicated for their 1975 era technology.

9. I have to pick from a long list of license plate categories, some of which are RANDOMLY ALL CAPITALIZED. Really, is it so important to distinguish between "Automobile" (which isn't at the top of the list) and the dozens of cause license plates. Aren't they all license plates for automobiles?

10. (Later still. Maybe I should finish the process before posting, since every single step has bonus stupid.) The system wants my credit card number without spaces.

11. I have to give them a minimum of $40. Why? Because they're douchebags. It will take me years to spend that much. I'm essentially giving them an interest free loan for two or three years. They can take that money, invest it, and make a profit. No, it's not much per person, but across the hundreds of thousands of I-Passes, it's enough money to be worth raising the minimum from a reasonable $10 to an unreasonable $40.

12. Session length is apparently less than 10 minutes. In the time it took to type entries 10 and 11 above, I was logged out midway through paying.

I would like to applaud Illinois for making nearby states seem better by sucking so much. Every trip through your state is tainted by memories of your craptacular toll system. Your toll system, which is one of the first things I interact with in your state, is obviously an abusive monopoly run by incompetent scum. It's only human to assume that the rest of your state is abuse, incompetent, and scummy. This unfairly tarnishes the rest of your state, so why do you allow your highway system to do so?

(Edit: Added several items and rewrote last paragraph since original post.)