24 Years After Opening, Highway 6 Will Start Sending Bills by Text and Email

Highway 6, Israel’s first toll road, has an operating concessionaire above it, and above that a regulator, Cross Israel. And above them all is the Ministry of Transport. Still, for years occasional drivers who are not subscribers have been surprised to receive toll bills late by mail, or not receive them at all, leading to fines and account seizures.

Yet only recently did the Ministry of Transport remember to submit for approval to the Knesset Finance Committee regulations that would allow the Highway 6 concessionaire to send drivers bills also by text message or email. That is 30 years after email and mobile text messages became common in Israel.

To encourage drivers to switch to digital billing, and to save money for the concessionaire, a discount of two shekels will be offered in collection fees. The Transport Ministry representative, attorney David Tamir, explained in the debate in which the regulations were approved this morning that the amendment was intended to address difficulties encountered by occasional users on Highway 6 because mail is not received. According to him, the goal is to create an alternative for the concessionaire for sending the bill by text message, email, or another means of communication approved by the supervising authority over the operator. Tamir did not say why the ministry had delayed for years with the obvious regulation.

MK Shalom Danino (Likud), who served as acting chairman, said that “we need to be very careful in this process and check that there is no glitch along the way, because if people agree to the change and the bill still does not arrive, that will be their problem.”

Shimon Abraham, vice president for concessions at Cross Israel, which oversees the road operator, noted that the road opened in 2002 and that its users are either subscribers or occasional users. He added that there are about 270,000 trips a day, about 90 percent are subscribers, and about 175,000 invoices are sent each month to occasional users.

It was also raised in the debate that about 47 percent of occasional bills are not paid on time and lead to collection costs, and the amendment is intended to address exactly that figure, ease the burden on consumers and lead to timely payment that will reduce unnecessary fines. As noted, at the end of the debate the regulations were approved and are expected to take effect in about three months, after thousands more drivers do not receive their charges on time.

Transport Minister Miri Regev, who has served for a cumulative total of more than five years, rushed to take credit for the move, without explaining why it had been delayed for so long. “As part of the service and digitization revolution that I am leading in the Ministry of Transport, we continue to remove barriers, reduce bureaucracy and make services accessible to the public. The time has come to move into the digital age and end the situation in which honest citizens absorb fines of thousands of shekels and account seizures just because a letter did not arrive in the mail. The move approved today will save money directly in the consumer’s pocket, prevent distress and significantly improve service for road users.”

Let us only hope that drivers who receive a text message about a new invoice will be able to distinguish it from the many phishing texts that report fabricated fines for nonpayment in order to steal the recipient’s credit card details.