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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
This technology was very recently deployed in Ireland. There have been severe problems with it, including both the video and tag system simultaneously billing some customers. Funny thing is a lot of people forget there's a toll there at all any more - there used to be constant protests about the motorway in question.
They have been doing this in Toronto with 407ETR for a long long time. Wonder why it just started in US?
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.
seriously.. if I rent a car- I'm going to be back billed later by the agency?
yeah- that's not an issue at all...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
"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
First Canadian to post we have had this in Ontario for years now... called the 407.
It's not a bad technology. However here, there is a crazy charge for the photo portion that basically makes it impractical not to have a transponder. Each time you don't have a transponder and get photoed... the charge is like 6 dollars or something. A monthly transponder is 2 dollars. So I just keep a transponder even though I don't use regularly.
The only advice I would give is to make sure the 'toll' period is reasonable. In the 90s recessions, our government signed the highway away to a private company for a 99 year lease. Most other places in the world, it is common to see 10-20 year lease.
Of course isn't this what the gas tax supposed to be for :) Oh the joys of non-dedicated government taxation.
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.
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.
Almost every toll booth in australia is automated. Just recently, the Sydney harbor bridge become completely automated. The biggest problem is that when you don't have an "E-Tag" on your car, the bill gets sent to your house with a $10 or more Administration Fee... So your $3 toll becomes $13 everytime you drive through
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. ;-)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Making every single person slow down and just about stop on the highway is completely idiotic. Here's how Wisconsin does it, since toll boths are illegal here. We charge an extra high tax on the gasoline that's sold everywhere in the state. So there you go, the more you use the roads, the more you pay for them to be repaired. And compared to other states, we have really nice, well upkept roads so I guess it works, doesn't it?
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
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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There's no way to pay manually. Sections that are toll aren't well marked. Cost isn't clearly defined and changes as a function of time and/or traffic density. So when turning in the rental car there's no way to determine the charges for tolls.
Months after the trip I got a bill from the car rental agency: cost of tolls + several taxes + surcharge by the car rental agency + a billing fee.
Can you tell I'm not a fan of this technology?! Car rental agency added costs were more than twice the cost of tolls.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
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.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I live in Austin. We recently got some new toll roads. The money for them was already allocated, but city counsel approved the decision to make them toll roads anyway. Then I learned that the company that has the maintenance/operating contract, Cintra, is a Spanish company. So we're not only paying for these roads twice, the profit leaves Texas. I'm boycotting the new toll roads, I hope the choke on them. I'm not opposed to toll roads in general. I recognize that the money for road maintenance needs to come from somewhere, but Austin is an example of the worst way to go about it.
-Chris (aka Lenwood)
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.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
hat is the first lesson the homeless learn.
Only some homeless. However some homeless know how useful a car is. I used to know some people who lived in their cars. And having the transportation can make it easier to find and get a job.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
So? What do you want, a free lunch? The maintenance of roads cost money.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Of course it costs money. Where the hell is all that tax money I pay on gas going?!
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Introduction of "random checks" near the tollbooths that prove to have a significant enough number of "bounced" toll charges.
They have a photo of the car, driver and the license plate that "bounced" - they know who to stop.
So, you either end up in some serious trouble for driving a car with fake license plates OR you don't get caught that time (cause you were not using them at the time) but you NEVER get the bright idea do that again.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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
Gas taxes in the US are not high enough to pay the annual costs of the US road system. The rest of the money for maintaining our roads comes from general revenue.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
If tolls pay for the roads. There are an abundance of reasons why it makes much more sense to pay for roads with tolls.
It would end the massive subsidization of the trucking industry, which is WAY less efficient at transporting goods than rail/intermodal transport. If the truckers had to actually PAY the full cost (and pass it on to their customers) that would internalize this cost. The result would be lower prices AND lower taxes for the average person.
Why SHOULD I have to pay (and I do, the gas taxes only pay a fraction of road costs) out of my general tax dollar which is now recaptured by businesses getting subsidized delivery of goods? Especially if I only drive say 3000 miles a year and someone else drives 4x that much? Let them pay for all that extra driving they do.
It would certainly encourage the use of mass transit.
Once vehicles get a lot more efficient, or electric, then how is the gas tax going to work? It won't. OK, we could tack the cost onto the price of a vehicle, but that's bad because now it has to be paid up front, which means you have to borrow the money when you buy the car. Plus again people that drive less are getting ripped off.
Tolls SHOULD be the way roads are paid for. Make the user of the service pay for the service. This is what free market economics is all about.
As for all the objections related to 'well they'll just put the money in a slush fund', that's dumb. Corrupt is corrupt. Why would it matter what the source of the revenue is? That's a problem on the SPENDING side, not the collecting side.
I can see SOME argument when it comes to minor surface roads in that there are externalized benefits as well as costs. Emergency services need to be able to use those roads, etc, but the argument still ultimately stands. If the fire dept needs to get everywhere, then allocate that cost to the fire dept! The externalized benefits are then ultimately shifted back to the general revenue and we end up with a much better allocation of costs.
I see NO ultimate downside, except if you live way out in the middle of nowhere you are going to have a problem, but that's only because right now people out in the middle of nowhere pay nowhere near the cost to society of them living there! Its their choice. If its too expensive to live out there, then you can move into town.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
It has already been done.
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/26/2632.asp
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
If you're in the US, your gas prices are so freakin' low that you SHOULD be charged per km (sorry, per mile).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_usage_and_pricing
Increase the price of gas, or charge per mile.