The Quickpass office opened its doors and showed of its memory banks to the media Thursday, as a reminder that, yes, the Golden Ears Bridge is open, and it could be another route for harried commuters trying to get around the Lower Mainland.

But only a fraction of the motorists using the bridge, eight per cent, are taking advantage of the bargain-basement transponder rate of $2.75 per crossing.

The vast majority of bridge users, 87 per cent, are paying premium prices, the top rate of $3.90 charged on vehicles that don’t have transponders.

Only 25,900 transponders have been issued since the bridge opened in June, while 266,900 motorists have crossed the bridge without signing up for the device.

For motorists who think they’re not in the system because they didn’t register for a transponder, it only takes one crossing.

The first time a vehicle crosses, the licence plate number is captured and sent to ICBC, which forwards Quickpass the billing and vehicle information.

But there will always be those who want to scam the system and cross the bridge for free.

“People will try anything. You’d be amazed at what they try,” said Rosa Rountree, CEO for Transroute Intl. Canada, a subsidiary of Egis Projects, the French company contracted to operate the tolling system.

However, she pointed out that people are creatures of habit. And if they’re not caught the first time, eventually they will be by random RCMP enforcement and stuck with fines far higher than the fares.

Transroute employees showed the nerve centre of the Quickpass operation, its office on Harris Road in Pitt Meadows, site of a call centre and banks of terminals where employees review vehicle licence plates for billing purposes.

If a vehicle is registered and the cameras can read both licence plates, then optical character recognition automatically transfers billing information to the customer.

Unregistered vehicles or those without both plates require manual input from the images.

But there’s little room for error. Every vehicle that crosses the bridge is photographed at least a dozen times by some of the 55 cameras on the bridge. Three cameras in each lane, shooting from each direction, photograph the vehicles.

The number of billing errors, is less than one per cent, according to Quickpass stats compiled since July 16, the first day of tolling.

Vehicle images remain on file for three months, providing the account is paid, before they are purged from the system. Photo images of vehicles though can’t be used by police, unless they have a court order.

“We’re no different than any other company or private business,” Rountree explained. “But we are not here for enforcement. This is a toll bridge and we’re here to collect tolls.”

TransLink spokesman Drew Snider said when the bridge opened in June that there were no specific targets for the number of daily crossings.

During the 30-day, toll-free period, about 44,000 vehicles crossed the bridge. That’s now averaging about 24,000 vehicles a day and expected to jump to about 40,000 within a year.

As construction progresses on the new Port Mann Bridge, that number could climb, said Rountree.

“Over time, we’ll see that volume will grow.”

The Quickpass system is one of the few open road tolling systems in North America where vehicles don’t have to slow down to pay at a toll booth. Egis runs another such operation in San Diego and another in Dublin, Ire. Highway 407 in Toronto is also an electronically tolled road.

TransLink is paying Transroute $2.2 million for the first year of the tolling service.

The bridge is bringing in roughly $2 million a month in revenues. TransLink then pays Golden Crossing General Partnership, the consortium that built the bridge for charges that include direct financing for property, tolling, project development and third party costs.