Jessica Musicar was shocked when she got a letter from a collections agency telling her she owed $75 for failure to pay a toll evasion ticket on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge.

She was surprised in part because she didn't recall receiving the initial notice of violation, but also because she lives in Montana - and hadn't been to the Bay Area in more than six years.

Heidi Allingham had a similar experience more than a thousand miles away. She was at her San Diego home when she received a letter saying she owed $7 for an unpaid toll on the Golden Gate Bridge.

She thought it was a scam at first and almost threw the letter away. Turns out, she was cited despite not having crossed a Bay Area bridge in more than a decade.

The women are among those who have been incorrectly cited as the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which oversees toll collection on most Bay Area bridges, moves away from human toll-takers in favor of automated systems that scan license plates and run down unpaid money.

On most Bay Area bridges, drivers who don't pay with cash or a FasTrak transponder have their plates scanned by a special camera and then matched to their registration. They receive an invoice - at least when the system works as intended.

But there are glitches, and some drivers complain that the hassle they cause is compounded by a burdensome appeals process.

It's a process that commission officials say is intentionally rigorous - the better to prevent actual toll scofflaws from easily overturning valid tickets.

"My biggest issue was that it was impossible to get ahold of anyone from FasTrak," said Allingham, 56, who works as an administrative assistant.

After trying multiple phone numbers listed on the commission's website, Allingham said she found an e-mail address and eventually - after mailing a picture of her license plate - had her citation cleared. She learned that a camera had read an "F" on the plate as an "E."

For Musicar, a 35-year-old social media curator, it wasn't quite so easy.

She apparently missed the first citation notice because she had moved, and so her ticket went to a collection agency. She had also sold the car in question - so she had trouble proving she wasn't, in fact, the person who crossed the bridge.

Misread dash

After numerous calls to the collections agency and FasTrak, Musicar said she was able to reach a manager who had enough authority to resolve her problem. But the process left her irritated. In her case, she said, the camera misread the spacing of a dash.

"At one point," she said, "I almost just paid the thing to get it over with, but my husband said, 'No way.' "

Randy Rentschler, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, said the appeals process is cumbersome on purpose.

"The way we have to work, to function as a retail business, is for people to go through the system," he said. "We have third-party customer service and we have ways for people to escalate their claims" if they feel they've been wrongly cited.

If a citation was easier to overturn, he said, the system would be flooded with calls from people who were legitimately billed.

"We think the process we have in place is effective," he said. "There has to be a balance of accessibility, but also having people work through the system in place."

Rentschler acknowledged that mistakes happen, often when a license-plate bracket obscures a letter, or a dash gets misread. Dashes are a known soft spot in the system, as California plates don't include them.

"Our experience here is that the vast majority of those violations are, in fact, violators, but there is a small number that are not, and mix-ups do happen," Rentschler said.

The agency has processed more than 128 million toll transactions in the fiscal year that ended June 30. That doesn't include the Golden Gate Bridge, which is managed by a separate authority.

Violation notices

Over the same period, the transportation commission said, it issued nearly 575,000 first notices of a toll violation. Officials could not immediately provide details on how many citations were appealed or overturned.

"We do literally millions of transactions a year, and with that kind of volume, sometimes we are going to be at fault," Rentschler said. "Our customer service isn't always perfect and oddities do take place, but we try to be stewards of those who pay the tolls."

What's not working Issue: Drivers say they've received citations for toll evasion on Bay Area bridges even though they didn't cross the spans. They say the appeals process to get the tickets reversed is long and cumbersome. What's been done: The Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which oversees toll collection, says some errors by automated license-plate scanners are inevitable given the volume of transactions, but that the system is effective. Who's responsible: Steve Heminger, MTC executive director, sheminger@mtc.ca.gov. People who believe they got incorrect citations can go to www.bayareafastrak.org or call the agency's information line at (877) 229-8655 (BAYTOLL).