Welcome to Bay Area transit infrastructure, where the upgrades go backward.

The old FasTrak Flex tag was a genuinely good piece of design. It was small, intuitive, and had physical switches you could set by feel to indicate the number of passengers in your vehicle — critical for carpool lane discounts. It beeped when a toll reader registered it. Simple. Functional. Done.

The replacement? A larger tag with a tiny dial that's hard to see once it's mounted to your windshield, especially in low light. No beep. As one Bay Area commuter put it, "I tried to use the new dial recently on a dark morning before sunrise and I just couldn't tell how many passengers it was set to." Another local was even more blunt: "This is the perfect design… have it on all the cars. Why change."

What's maddening isn't just the downgrade — it's the total lack of communication. Multiple Bay Area drivers had no idea their tags were being phased out. FasTrak's own website reportedly still shows the old Flex model. So we're swapping a superior product for an inferior one, telling nobody about it, and not even updating the website. Peak government agency behavior.

Look, this isn't the biggest fiscal outrage in the Bay Area by a long shot. But it's a perfect little case study in how public agencies operate: take something that works, spend money replacing it with something worse, and don't bother telling the people who use it. No public input, no explanation, no accountability.

If FasTrak is taking requests — and we doubt they are — how about bringing back the beep, making the dial readable at night, and maybe, just maybe, offering them in black? A tollpayer can dream.