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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."
As one other Canadian has noted in this thread, this technology has been deployed around the Toronto area for a while and works quite effectively. However, it's not correct for the author to say that Red Light Cameras are going anywhere soon; Toronto is already pushing to use this system instead. Some basic math can tell you that a driver who makes it between an on-ramp and an off-ramp in less than the maximum legal time it should take to travel that distance is speeding - the Ontario Parliament is already taking steps to use this to bill speeders instead of red light cameras because of the significantly higher volume on the highways as well as the dual usage of billing people for the toll road. It's a great system for raising funds for the repair bill of a road that's used often, but it will start to replace frequently sympathetic traffic cops with a trial-less ticket mailed to your door sooner than you think.
It's been done in the states for at least a decade. Toll tags and such are commonplace in the metro areas, and now there's even talk of turning some of our interstates into toll roads.
I vehemently oppose the idea of toll roads on those "major artery" roads that connect our nation. It's one thing to add a toll road in an urban area where there are plenty of alternate paths, but placing an arbitrary price on traveling from one place to another is essentially restricting the right of travel. Our government should not be in the business of making it more expensive for me to go see my family 100 miles away.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Various interstates have been toll roads for DECADES. This is nothing new. I-95 is a toll road through Delaware. I-76 across Pennsylvania and I-76/80 in Ohio. I-44 in Oklahoma and I-35 in Kansas.
The reason States do this is so they can maintain their own roads, rather than beg the U.S. for money.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
If you've rented a car, then it's very obviously not an issue for you. You're already agreeing to plead guilty to any traffic ticket the car receives while it is rented to you (e.g., red light camera tickets) and have it charged to your credit card.
I'm an old fart. Knowing my car is going to be tracked gives me the willies, just as knowing the NSA is reading all my emails and IMs, listening to all my phone calls, and watching all my web surfing.
But look. It can't be prevented. Cameras are getting to be so small and cheap, and computing power is so ubiquitous, that it won't be long, a decade or two at the most, before 90% of the population has a full time camera as their collar button, broadcasting to a public server and archived for posterity, and every bozo that wants to will be able to see anything desired.
I am serious about this. It cannot be stopped.
But rather than gripe about something that cannot be stopped, I think about the consequences, and I tell you what, I think it will end up in greater freedom. Let's take this to an extreme. Suppose they can issue automatic speeding tickets to every car which passes cameras too quickly. They'll be issuing speeding tickets to half the cars out there. This obviously can't be handled the same as now -- they'd be suspending every driver within days or weeks.
They will have to come up with an alternative, which I guess to be raising speed limits to something reasonable such that much less than 1% of licenses are suspended every year, and speeding will turn into minor revenue sources -- you want to get somewhere faster? Pay a buck or two more, or $5 more, and no points, no fines, no problem.
Or consider the privacy problem. I sure don't like knowing I will be tracked everywhere I go. But consider what happens when everyone is tracked by everyone's cameras. It will apply to **everyone**, including the rich and famous, not just ordinary blokes. The billions of publicly available fully archived webcams will quickly outnumber politically controlled government cameras.
Remember, there will be public broadcasts of billions of webcams, nice high resolution ones, with plenty of archival storage. Want to know who met with your local politician just before that vote change to help a huge contractor? Programs will abound which will search archives for specific individuals or cars, or just go to the politician's and contractor's houses, go back thru the archive til you find them, follow them backwards -- when they disappear off one webcam, there will be dozens or hundreds already picking up the trail.
Just as the gun equalized "might makes right", eliminating the advantage of lots of idle time for sword practice which peasants didn't have, this ubiquitous surveillance will equalize anonymity. Ordinary people don't have much of it now; the rich and powerful do. In a decade or two, they won't have it either.
When there are billions of webcams to choose from for your own idle pleasure or to target your computer search programs on, who would you rather see -- your neighbors who you already see all day, or Donald Trump? The rich and powerful have far more to lose than ordinary folk.
We will *ALL* live in a small town where nobody can hide anything. I relish that thought and think it a damned fine tradeoff for loss of privacy.
Infuriate left and right
My car is the only thing that shields me from the failures of society. This 3mm steel wall between me and the scum is all I can ever hope to get in the now socialist Western Europe.
I have no legally available weapon to defend myself against millions of knife-wielding gangsters in our buses and subways, the "youth", you know who I'm talking about.
The police feeding off my taxes is overwhelmed with hundreds of calls every hour, while and because judges and state attorneys will free two out of three suspects because of social outlook and on parole, even after dozens of misdemeanors.
Welfare allows 80% of the "Youths" to never work one day in their life. We never force anyone to do anything, we pay hard cash and you'd never even have to say "thanks". It's not only the group torching all the cars in our capital cities, the one you know I'm talking about, but also a sheer staggering amount: a third of our workforce, oh and they are sooooo willing to work, just not at McDonalds or the dollar store, that's too low for them, really.
That's why I drive that car to work. It's 5km away, I could basically walk. But then again, I have to wear a clean white collar to work everyday, which means I'd probably get annoyed, spit at or mugged by the feral illiterates who prowl our cities.
Thanks, but I'd rather pay another quarter of my income for having a 3mm steel wall and 100kW acceleration between me and the welfare-diseased scum.
Initially the E470 toll road was envisioned as a loop around the entire Denver metro area, allowing easy access for people in the suburbs to the airport, the Denver tech center south of town, and the interstate roads toward the ski resorts. By bypassing all that traffic around downtown, they would ease congestion significantly, especially during the winter months.
Unfortunately the residents of Golden, an upscale suburb slightly off the beaten path west of Denver, didn't like the idea of the plebians being able to access their town without having to jump through hoops to get there. They torpedoed the completion of the loop to keep the rabble out of their isolated, upscale community. The result of this is that any skiers coming from the heavily populated areas north of Denver are routed through the center of the city on their way to the slopes, causing congestion and traffic misery for both the tourists and residents.
Meanwhile, not content to make up for massively cutting their operating budget by no longer having any toll collectors, thus slashing their payroll and ongoing operating costs to a bare minimum, the governing body of E470 implemented a toll raise to pay for the new automated technology that will save them millions yearly.
Now that they've put people out of work, hopefully greed for the lost revenue in skier tolls they're missing out on every year will drive the owners of E470 to use that extra money to lobby various legislative bodies that will mandate the completion of the loop.
The residents of Golden delayed the rollout of HDTV in Denver for years by blocking the construction of upgraded antennae, until finally it required a federal mandate to push things through. Let's hope that the E470 governing body's lust for capital is enough to trump the isolationists in Golden.
Sometimes the only way to beat nakedly greedy, corrupt elitists is to sic other nakedly greedy, corrupt elitists on them.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
Seriously! You people down in the states still use toll booths? How deliciously quaint. Here in Ontario we've been using automated systems for a long time on the ETR with no problems well at least none with the actual mechanics of the system. The company that runs it are a bunch of jackasses and the government should be shot for selling it to that company in the first place but there you go.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
Because of course as soon as they bill you and find out you don't exist then they have a description of the car.
In fact it would be much better than that for them. First of all the toll system can look you up RIGHT AWAY, and if the camera is smart enough to determine make, model, and color of car, then surely a mismatch comes up or the plate doesn't exist at all, and 5 miles down the road you're pulled over.
And the fine for a fake plate, well it probably isn't pretty. It sure is a lot more serious than a speeding ticket. I'd be quite willing to bet that it costs more than the toll x1000.
Even if they only figure it out a week later they still know what the car looks like.
Now couple this with extra cameras the fact that it is getting pretty easy to track individual vehicles in real time and I don't think too many people would get away with it for long. They only have to EVENTUALLY bust 1% of the offenders to make it not worth doing. Especially if you get a 90 suspension or something.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
in Chicago you can go at speed (whatever your speed is!) through the iPass (that's what we call it...) because it is 2-4 lanes separated from the actual booths.
I was told by a somewhat reliable source who is an anorak about this stuff that they have been tested up to 110mph and still work fine.
I like microcars