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Automation May Make Toll Roads More Common
bfwebster writes "Here in Denver, we have E-470, a toll section of the 470 beltway, that uses the usual transponder attached to your windshield. Fair enough, and I make use of it, particularly in driving to the airport. But they've just implemented new technology on E-470 that allows anyone to drive through the automated toll gates. If you don't have a transponder, it takes a photo of your license plate and sends a monthly bill to your house. As a result, the company that runs E-470 plans to close all human-staffed toll booths by mid-summer. And as an article in this morning's Rocky Mountain News notes, 'Such a system could be deployed on other roads, including some that motorists now use free. The result: a new source of money for highways and bridges badly in need of repair.' You can bet that legislators, mayors, and city councilpersons everywhere will see this as an even-better source of income than red-light cameras. You've been warned."
...where everyone can be trusted and no one uses false plates to
1) not having to pay
2) just playing a prank to someone.
It will happen the same as with the red light cameras. People will use false license plates or even no plates at all.
Onda Technology Institute
The result: a new source of money for highways and bridges badly in need of repair.' You can bet that legislators, mayors, and city councilpersons everywhere will see this as an even-better source of income than red-light cameras. You've been warned."
Why is this a bad thing? If the users of the road have to pay a little extra to maintain the road they're using, I don't have problem with it. If the money is being poured into some politician's slush fund, sure that's a problem, but reasonable use fees are exactly what's called for her. It sure beats the "selective billing" process of red-light cameras.
"People still aren't comfortable with tolling,"
People are uncomfortable because of the unknown. Each town may have a different company managing the roads with different costs and fees associated. As a tourist am I hope I don't get 50 different bills in the mail for a nice road trip. Each bill with a $5 administrative fee.
the ability to charge tolls without prepaid accounts or coins.
Hopefully there will still be one lane open for coin/cash transactions.
What is to stop someone from making sets of fake plates with YOUR number on them and running through these toll roads or red lights?
already being done by kids here
I like microcars
Isn't the purpose of the gasoline tax in the United States to account for the wear an tear that your vehicle causes to the roads? If we start implementing tolling on nearly every major highway, we should start to see a reduction or removal of the gasoline tax. No way in hell should we be paying for something twice.
Warning: Corny karma killing post above.
I rarely drive. Why should I subsidize the people who drive 100 miles a day to commute into the city from their faux-rural home? Toll roads are a great way to pass the cost along to those who benefit from the service. In fact, instead of a blanket tax, it makes sense to bill people for their annyal road use (assuming a perfect world with tamper-proof odometers, of course). It would encourage people to drive less and drive home the true cost of public infrastructure. We live in a strange political bubble where universal medicare is viewed as dangerously "socialist" (somehow invoking fears of dictators waving red flags), whereas multi-billion dollar tax funded road networks are seen as a panacea. Bloody odd.
All roads in the U.S. and Canada are toll roads. You pay the toll at the gasoline pump through the ~70 cent per gallon tax. As it should be. If you're going to make use of government-paved roads, it makes sense to pay for that usage. Places with "extra" tolls are typically high-expense areas like tunnels & bridges where the gasoline toll is not enough to cover costs.
Alternatively you could get a horse-and-buggy and pay nothing, like my Amish neighbors do. ;-)
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This is a total non-issue.
First, making it stick will be practically impossible. If they have the plate, a car that matches your model (down to the year, since there will be differences), AND you have no alibi, then maybe a judge will make you pay.
Second, there are solutions to this, such as increasing the penalties for having fake plates on a car or photographing the driver to increase the likelihood counterfeiters are caught.
Third, toll booths already snap a picture of your car if you run the booth resulting in a bigger fine than just paying the toll. (So this method of payment will actually cost you LESS money if someone fakes your plate.)
Fourth, they would have to run through the toll many, many times to make you pay a significant amount, each time risking the consequences and each time providing you with an opportunity to present an alibi.
That I already pay taxes to maintain the roads. I pay a federal tax on gasoline, which is supposed to be used to maintain the interstate highway system.
I find it kind of unsettling that after taking my tax dollars to build and maintain their highways, certain states believe they can now charge an extra fee simply because the road passes through their state. If they can send me a bill for driving on a highway built with my tax dollars, perhaps I should be allowed to send them an invoice for reimbursement of the fuel taxes I paid while in their state.
The idea behind having federal funding of roads is that you create a system of roads by which everyone is allowed to travel, free of charge. If individual states want to get into the toll-road business, we're going to end up like we were in the 30's and 40's, where there was no consistency in road quality and signage from one state to the next.
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Eventually, it will start at the end of your driveway, and continue to wherever you're going. Too many tolls now. I finally canned the idea of going to Atlantic City this weekend because... not the price of the motels... and not the price of what I might lose at poker... but because of about $38 or so, if I remember right, for the tolls to get there. Bridges, tunnels, turnpikes - it all adds up. Screw it. Stay here and chop some weeds, go shopping, haul stuff that's taking up too much room to the Goodwill store.
Figure that will be one way to sell it. Hello carbon tax.
Yes it is not reasonable to you or me, however there are many who would like nothing more to "punish" people who drive cars, after all only the rich or those who don't care if they are destroying the planet will drive cars. Honestly this is how it will come to pass. We have toll roads that were supposed to expire (ga400) when they paid off, guess what, ain't happened and won't ever happen.
Once a government gets a tax in it will take a change of government to remove it. I seriously doubt it will be republican or democrats that will help us.
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In the middle age every road or bridge had a toll, and it is considered by many historians the one thing the kept their economy in the gutters. It was just too expensive to ship anything anywhere ! Think that France had extensive forests, but Louis XIV couldn't carry its wood from the center to the shore at affordable prices because of all the tolls. So the wood used in warship construction was purchased in Spain ! Well, the flip side of the coin is that France still has plenty of forest while Spain is mostly a desert since that time. The main roman advance is the construction of roads. Not the construction of tolls ! It kept the empire in one piece for half a millennium.
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Everybody should be paying for roads whether they are driving or not. If you rely on public transportation to get around you are still using the road. Even if you never leave your house or building you are using the road system. All of the goods you purchase are traveling by road.
Some smaller towns are running into the problems of decreased fuel tax revenue as more people buy electric or high fuel efficiency vehicles. A low percentage tax that everybody pays should pay for roads.
Our government should not be in the business of making it more expensive for me to go see my family 100 miles away.
But I assume that you agree they should make it /possible/ to see your family 100 miles away?
4) Quite a few of the companies running such systems are run by European companies that take all the profits back home rather than reinvesting in this country.
While I agree with the rest of your post, why is point 4) a bad things ? Shall we now boycott all US company in Europe on the ground that they bring the money back in the US, instead of Europe ? Don't you think it is a rather dumb argument , especially knowing how mostly bad can be protectionism in some case ? Because sooner or later it falls down in a tit-for-tat fight.
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I didn't realize that Texas had the ability to elect the President of the US all by itself.
This will encourage a new crime, called stealing someone else's legitimate license plate.
And replacing the victim's legitimate license plate with a legitimate-looking fake one, unbeknownst to the victim.
Yes, yes, and then people will start making masks that look like your face and robbing banks with them. And they'll steal some loose hairs from your keyboard at work, Gattaca-style, and plant those at the scene. And they'll replace all your friends and relatives with body-doubles who will lie about your whereabouts on that day.
The OP fails to mention some things about the C470/NW Parkway here in Denver
It's pretty much the most expensive per-mile toll road in the country. And they keep raising the rates on it every 6 months.
I could save about 5 - 8 minutes out of my 35 min commute if I used it. However, that would cost me $120 per month. $3 for 8 miles of road (each way) in my case. And that's *one* toll booth.
And the reason those 8 miles would save me that much time is that no one uses the thing because of the ever-increasing tolls.
I am being completely serious when I say that at 5pm (rush hour) on the northern 1/4 of the toll road, you would be hard pressed to encounter more than 6 - 7 other cars while on it. Meanwhile, the surface roads that run near it are packed with cars.
And don't get me started about how the toll road always seems to be plowed when it snows while the surface streets aren't.
It's not that I can't afford $120/mo ... I just refuse. It's the principle of the thing. I already pay for roads; it's called paying my taxes. Cut my taxes by $120/mo and I'll gladly pay for that road rather than the ones I'm using now.
You do have a point. As far as social order, except in highly congested cities, cars keep people isolated and moving along. The longer space between cities and suburbs means that while traveling your pretty safe inside your own vehicle and so are all the other drivers. IF you forced everyone to take subway or buses there would be more assaults both from thugs and regular people having a bad day.
I don't think American society could adapt to the slower pace of a mass-transit system. The average work week is 10 hours longer than in most of Europe, without cars there's simply not enough time per day to go where you gotta be. Consider Europeans also get many more vacation days and personal time that's 2-3x as much as Americans to take a half day off to visit the doctor or do personal business.. things Americans do at lunchtime.. in their cars.
Our government should not be in the business of making it more expensive for me to go see my family 100 miles away.
But I assume that you agree they should make it /possible/ to see your family 100 miles away?
Thereby making it more expensive for me for you to see your family 100 miles away.
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Do you have any data at all to support these assertions? From the second statement I assume that the safety you refer to in your first statement is related to violent crime. Of course you seem to totally ignore the question of safety from accidents related to transportation, which is far more likely to cause death or injury to any given individual than violent crime.
Regarding the likelihood of an increase in ridership leading to a rise in violent crime on mass transit, I'd like to seem some data to support that assumption. Further, even if we assume that violent crime rates did rise with say a 400% increase in mass transit utilization, something I'm not willing to concede is likely but certainly not totally outside the realm of possibility, what is going to matter most to the riders is the per mass-transit user crime rate (which would determine the likelihood of any individual person being the victim of a crime).
Of course it is highly dependent upon where you are, where you are going, and how well designed and operated the mass transit system you are riding is, but I don't see any reason to believe that a blanket statement that mass transit takes longer than commuting in a car. From my own personal experience, having spent three years commuting ever day on a subway to an from work with an occasional trip by car, I can say unequivocally it was much faster by train. What's more it wasn't wasted time. I could read on the train, which I could not safely do in the car. Add to that it was much less stressful.
I think American society could adapt just fine to mass transit. I'm definitely speculating but from the tone of your post, I think it is you yourself who feels you could not adapt to a car-less existence.
So? What do you want, a free lunch? The maintenance of roads cost money.
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Sort of. Some of the toll roads in Oklahoma were promised to have been "paid off" some years ago, at which point they were supposed to become regular roads, yet magically the tolls stay in place for (insert reason) every year...
They have warnings about this in car rental agencies in Toronto. You can pay for a transponder or pay a massive service charge and the toll afterwards.
I think I used the 407 three times. It would be useful, but the company managing it has steadily increased prices since it was created, and the bizzare connection between license suspension and a private company is scary. Especially when the private company doesn't answer the phones and keeps making mistakes with the bills.
I've taken to overpaying by one penny, so that they send me a statement tellign me that I have a one penny credit. I know it doesn't do much damage to them, but it gives me a feeling of satisfaction.
The privatization is another problem I suppose. Never let your government privatize your roads, it is criminal.
Of course it costs money. Where the hell is all that tax money I pay on gas going?!
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90% of people can be honest and good and yet the last 10% will ruin it for everyone. The U.S. has no concept of responsibility for one's children. U.S. children are taught that sex is wrong and condoms are worse. Then they look at T.V. and see sex, sex, sex and have no idea how to deal with it. Then they end up having kids, but they're so selfish that they don't raise them properly. We end up with people who have absolutely no moral compass at all levels of society. There's only a few steps from the guy on the street who will stab you for the $5 in your wallet to the guy who puts up the ads saying "Your computer has a virus! Click here to fix it!" and hoping they will trick people into giving them money. Neither of these people have a moral compass. In fact, the man who stabs you probably needs the $5 a lot more. The advertiser just has no respect for other humans.
We're conditioned to be afraid of other Americans because enough of them are insane that we really should be afraid of them. There's a reason we lock up so many people and it isn't just crazy drug laws. So yes, expect U.S. society to develop differently. Our religious fanaticism creates generations of brainwashed morons who just keep having kids and begging the government for money. This means that we end up isolating ourselves because we know that walking down the street could get us killed.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Well, the planning argument will ONLY hold up if you were somehow able to go back in time and convince them back then to plan the cities better.
It isn't possible to completely tear up the current infrastructure and redo it for mass transit that is actually practical and convenient for the masses.
Two other big arguments against it ever happening, the economy, we'll not be able to afford that change. And also..the car culture that is ingrained into the US mindset will not be easily erased.
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Exactly. Why is everyone so afraid of a user pays system? If I choose not to have a car, why should my taxes subsidize the rest of you??? I do have a car btw, and although I live around 10km from the office, I do around 800km a week of work related travel so the bicycle idea won't work for me. I tried it once and hayfever nearly killed me :(
In the past 15 years we've had some major road upgrades done around Melbourne (Australia) which were funded via the use of tolls. I think it's a great idea. The amount of petrol you save by using the tollways goes a good way towards the cost of the tollways themselves, and you get where you are going faster and more safely. Even better, I use these tollways once or twice a year and so pay next to nothing for them!
My biggest grumble is how we let big trucks trundle down the freeways when there is a perfectly good rail system running parallel to it.