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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.
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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.
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
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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.
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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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'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.
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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.
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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.
So? What do you want, a free lunch? The maintenance of roads cost money.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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