If you have license plates from Mexico, you've got it made in the USA, because they don't bother writing parking tickets, and you won't get fined for using toll roads without paying the toll.

As El Paso prepares to open new toll roads, officials' inability to mail bills to Mexican drivers means only U.S. drivers will be required to pay.

Texas state Rep. Joe Pickett, D-El Paso, chairman of the House Committee on Transportation. “It will be a matter of time before people figure out if you’ve got a foreign license plate, you’re not going to get a bill.”

The first two tolled lanes in El Paso were added last year along a nine-mile, four-lane stretch of Loop 375 along the border. Before they opened, several local politicians, including Pickett and former El Paso Mayor John Cook, opposed the tolls because they would be enforceable only for U.S. drivers.

Like many other tolled roads in Texas, they have no toll booths. Drivers who use the lanes must have an electronic toll tag or their license plate is photographed and the driver mailed a bill.

The local mobility authority, which oversees pay-by-mail tolling, can't send bills to drivers with Mexican license plates because it doesn't have access to addresses associated with them.

If the agency’s inability to bill Mexican drivers becomes a larger problem, Telles said, the mobility authority could partner with the El Paso Police Department to use automated license plate readers to catch cars that frequently drive on the roads without paying.

However, he said, such enforcement methods are too costly to justify with lost revenue from foreign drivers so low.

El Paso isn’t the only border community running into this issue. In the Rio Grande Valley, Mexican drivers without toll tags make up only a small part of the traffic on the tolled State Highway 550, but the Cameron County Regional Mobility Authority isn’t able to bill them, either.

http://www.valleycentral.com/news/story.aspx?id=1246205#.VfGV_hHBzGc