We drove through 12 RFID lanes. Guess how many times we got stuck?

When it was introduced back in 2018, RFID was said to be the next big step in toll payments – no more winding down your car window to tap your Touch n’ Go card, no more replacing batteries for your SmartTAG device, less congestion at toll booths – but then you’ll see all sorts of comments and videos of people getting stucc:

…and it’s not just the netizens who’ve been pounding their keyboards (and their steering wheels), T. Saravanan, the CEO of the Federation of Malaysian Consumers Associations (FOMCA) was spittin’ zingers in response to the hiccups that were plaguing the system in January. Here’s one of them zingers:

“So far it’s just a glorified Touch ‘n Go system because it is not gateless or fully automated like the systems in Australia and Portugal.”

So this got us wondering if the situation is as bad as it seems; and it was down to me, this writer able to afford a car with the strongest journalistic curiosity, to find out.

Initially, the idea was to work with some highway companies to let me sit in a booth to observe how many cars got stuck, and (if possible) determine why they got stuck. However, this didn’t really pan out so I did the next best thing: I would drive through RFID lanes and see how many times I got stuck.

But first, I had to get an RFID sticker slapped on my car.

 

There’s a 24-hour activation period after installing the sticker

…which I didn’t know about, since it wasn’t stated on the main page of Touch n’ Go’s RFID website. In their defense, I probably should’ve gone through the FAQ first. Anywho, here’s a bullet list of steps to get an RFID sticker installed on your car:

• First, there’s a relatively simple registration process you gotta go through (link here)
• Subsequently, you can either buy an RFID sticker and stick it on yourself, or have one installed for you at a fitment center at no extra cost (RM35 either way)
• The sticker can be slapped on either the left headlamp of your vehicle or the top left corner of the windshield

I got mine stuck on for me at a fitment center since I’d heard horror stories of people messing up the sticker while DIY-ing it themselves. After returning home and waiting out the 24-hour activation period, I put on my proverbial driving gloves, and put the pedal to the metal.

For good measure, I borrowed a dashcam to record the entire journey because there’s never a good excuse to use your phone while driving. Then, I mapped out a route using TNG’s RFID Enabled Highways list that would take me though 13 RFID lanes across 7 highways in the Klang Valley:

• AKLEH (Ampang-MRR2 Interchange)
• BESRAYA (Loke Yew Toll Plaza)
• NPE (Pantai Dalam & PJS 2 Toll Plazas)
• SPRINT (Damansara & Kerinchi Links)
• NSE (Kota Damansara, Damansara & Jalan Duta Toll Plazas)
• MEX (Salak Selatan Toll Plaza)
• SMART Tunnel

In case you were wondering, I went through the MEX and AKLEH tolls twice (to and fro). We’ll get to my own experience in a bit, but one thing I want to highlight is….

 

I saw 3 drivers getting stuck

Out of 12 RFID lanes, I witnessed other drivers getting stuck and having to reverse out a grand total of 3 times. You can feel their frustration through the screen as you watch them doing the slow reverse of shame to a different lane

AKLEH (heading towards MRR2)

NPE (heading towards PJ)

NSE (heading towards Jalan Duta)

Now, don’t throw any shade at them because we don’t really know why they’d gotten stuck – which might have been clearer if we were sitting in the booth *COUGH* – but if any of these drivers would like to share their side of the story or want us to take down the video please send me an email ([email protected]).

We can rule out a system outage on the part of the toll booths since, well, other cars went through. In any case, from what I could find, there are 4 possible reasons for someone to get stuck:

• They didn’t have enough credit in their Touch n’ Go e-Wallet and didn’t have auto-reload
• Their RFID sticker was malfunctioning
• The sensor at the booth was randomly not reading the stickers
• They didn’t have RFID in the first place

This was all done on a weekend, so it didn’t really cause too much of an interruption, but it’s very easy to see how large a vehicular backlog this would have caused if it happened on a rush-hour Monday. But as to my own experience, well….

 

I got stuck ONE time (kinda)

So out of the 13 lanes I passed through, 12 opened their barriers for me without a hitch:

However, I would have been very stuck at the SMART tunnel booth.

Because there was no RFID lane. 

Not gonna lie, I haven’t used the SMART Tunnel in a while, so when I saw it listed “TNG RFID Enabled Highways” page, it seemed like a….smart….option to add to my route.

My confusion is suuuper obvious in the footage – I slowed down my car to a crawl just to make sure my eyes weren’t deceiving me. Nope, the Taman Desa SMART Tunnel (which leads to either Jalan Sultan Ismail or Jalan Tun Razak) did NOT offer RFID as a payment option. Thankfully, I still had my Touch n’ Go card that got me through the toll.

Just to make sure I wasn’t tripping, I drove out to the Sg Besi highway (the one in view of the old airport) to check whether it had an RFID lane. Double nope.

 

So… is RFID really that problematic?

When we were planning out this little experiment, we all thought that I’d get stuck 3 or 4 times. But nope, the experience was actually really smooth and the one time I got “stuck” wasn’t really because of an RFID error either. So this kinda leads us to 3 possible conclusions:

• CILISOS was secretly paid off
• I got really, really lucky
• Not many people post instances where the RFID actually worked

Of the 3, it seems that the most plausible might be the third reason, and it might be due to something called negativity bias. Essentially, our lizard brains are hardwired to focus on negative things and because of that, content creators and news outlets would focus on negativity because that’s where the views are. And that sortakinda leads to a confirmation bias because well, if we keep seeing it, it must be true.

But don’t get us wrong, it’s probably also a combination of user error (lookin’ at you, people who forget to top-up their e-Wallets or go to the wrong booth), back end glitches at the toll booths, and the placement of RFID stickers. Some of these kinks would be for Touch n’ Go to iron out, but you can also minimize some avoidable issues like signing up for auto-reload.

Of course, you could think that I was paid to downplay this issue; to which I can attest that I am a person of strong wheelpower. That bribery takes a toll on your soul. And that I am very aware that taking bribes is the start of my journey on the highway to hell.