Enterprise Helps Address Traffic Fines

2012-08-10 — /travelprnews.com/ — In an attempt to help address the outstanding traffic fines incurred by its car hire customers, Enterprise Holdings has contacted over 6,500 local governments across the US and Canada. It has submitted its contact information as part of public record in an annual reminder that directs government officials to deliver notices of outstanding fines to its shared services centres in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Toronto, Ontario.

Through its regional subsidiaries, the company owns and operates the Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National Car Rental and Alamo Rent A Car brands. It started consolidating and processing citation data on behalf of all its brands at its shared services centres after it acquired National and Alamo in 2007. Enterprise Rent-A-Car had previously handled customers’ traffic and parking penalties at its local offices.

Now the information about customers who have violated traffic laws is reviewed at its shared services centres and transmitted to the appropriate government officials. This allows the corresponding local courts to enforce fines quicker and reduces unpaid backlogs.

Car hire companies are legally required to pay their customers’ violations in some locations. However, many communities allow businesses to transfer the liability to whoever is responsible for the traffic penalty. On top of this, the enforcement process in some areas is made more complicated with electronic, unmanned toll booths or cashless tolls. These require the motorist to have a local payment device in order to proceed through the tolls.

To address this problem, the Enterprise, National and Alamo rental brands offer a video pass service for tolls – TollPass Automatic. This delivers automatic billing for customers who go through video tolling stations, and tolls are generated at an automated booth. It’s available for a small fee only in Washington state, Northern California, Colorado, Texas, Florida and North Carolina. Later this year, it will be offered to customers in British Columbia. In Maryland and many other destinations in the Northeast of the US, customers can rent a TollPass Device transponder. This allows them to pay tolls electronically.

Enterprise Holdings vice president Gary Cunningham says that local governments continue to have very tight budgets, and they know how much they depend on revenue from various toll, traffic and parking violations. Costly and long delays in collecting these penalties can impact several important services for taxpayers.

Cunningham added that they can help officials identify the individuals who owe penalties fast by streamlining the turnaround of this information. This will allow the governments to deal directly with the violators to collect their payment. They prefer for local officials to directly work with car hire customers, as this is the most cost-effective and efficient method to process fines.

Enterprise Holdings is the car hire industry’s most comprehensive service provider. Its worldwide network includes over 7,700 neighbourhood and airport locations. The group has 6,000 branches located within 15 minutes of 90% of the US’s population. Its brands were honoured with Leading Edge Awards from Executive Travel magazine last year for the top three car hire brands in the industry.

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