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Golden Gate Bridge To Eliminate Tollbooths
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The San Francisco Chronicle reports that tollbooths and toll collectors, a fixture at the Golden Gate Bridge since it opened in 1937, will be eliminated starting in 2012 as the bridge moves to an all-electronic system, cutting 34 jobs and saving $19.2 million over the first eight years. The bridge will move to a toll collection strategy that combines the existing FasTrak system with one that photographs the license plates of cars going through the toll plaza and mails a bill to the registered owners. Other structures and bridges have successfully gone to all-electronic tolls, including the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia and the Leeville Bridge in Louisiana, but not everyone is happy with the change. 'This is a world-famous bridge, and you need a human face,' says Philip Hynes. 'You need people in those toll booths to greet people.'"
I'd much rather cruise through tolls without having to stop, and I really have no desire to see these human toll booth operators.
so how does that work?
No you don't.
You need to eliminate the 5-minute backup at the toll booth, and thereby save yourself ~2000 hours over a lifetime. You don't need the human face, just as you don't need an operator asking, "Number please?" on the telephone.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Will make it easier to go to Wales and back.
Personally I love the tollway system here in Dallas (not that I use it much, public highways are FREE so to speak). Drive on, drive off, you get a bill at the end of the month with a summary of the charges. For someone who doesn't regularly use cash, it makes my life just a little bit easier. The other alternative is keeping a transponder in your car... not really my cup of tea.
But yeah, long story short we've had the system in effect on portions of Hwy 121 now for about 6 years and it's just recently gone live on the main "Dallas Tollway" with zero issues.
moox. for a new generation.
They're going to *mail* bills? Seriously? So, those that haven't got a FasTrac basically get across the bridge for free... A lot of the time anyway.
So, $19.2 million, divided by 8 years, divided by 34 people equals...
The toll-collectors get paid $70K per year?
When will they and all the other us systems link up with ez-pass?
u need people in those toll booths to greet people.'
No, you don't.
Further, what these idiots fail to realize is that all those cars idling at and then accelerating away from the tollbooths add up to a huge emissions source - something which California says they're always concerned about.
In the last decade they added "Open-road tolling" on the tollways around Chicago - the air quality was measurably improved in the areas near the toll-collection sites.
The bridges in the bay area are also major commuter routes - eliminating the requirement for every car to stop at a toll booth can only improve traffic flow.
For everyone who loves the toll collectors, I bet there are hundreds who hate them. I remember a story in one of the Chicago papers about all the bad things people would do to the toll collectors - like heating up coins using the car's cigarette lighter before giving them to the collector. The exhaust gasses those folks have to breathe all day can't be good for them either.
Putting moderation advice in your
This isn't a political rant, but I'd have thought the landmark bridges where owned by the state? Or is it common for the state to have road/bridge tolls in the US, to pay for upkeep?
Emotions! In your brain!
Like taken from one of Ayn Rand's book (you know the bad guys that represent all the same BS), if there are systems that would make it easier, faster and cheaper, why the hell would you ever want people there? I you don't like that, you should be filing a hurt feelings report (http://www.eatliver.com/i.php?n=2026)
There is really no reason to have all the additional expense of toll roads.
It's time to buy one of those James Bond style license plate flippers.
Tolls waste a lot of time and money in an attempt to spread the cost of the road to the people that 'use' it, but this doesn't work. Everyone benefits from the road system. Even if you don't own a car, the goods and services you use rely on them. Adding tolls just increases the cost of those goods and services, so the entire toll industry is a waste of time. Just tax people evenly for the roads we all rely on and skip the wasteful toll booths and electronics.
A toll booth attendant who actually greets people? C'mon........maybe I've been on the East Coast too long......they wouldn't make eye contact if you rolled through the booth in an Abrams tank....
I've driven from NY to CA and back a few times. The last time, driving to NY, I did it in 2.5 days. I wasn't driving while tired - I always took breaks at the first sign of drowsiness - but as you can imagine I wasn't in the friendliest and peppiest state. In Indiana, I waited in a large line for the cash toll booths - it was something like a 50 cent toll - how hard can it be?
I get up to the booth, and the middle-aged lady notices my California license plate and starts chatting me up. "Oh, you're from California? Where are you going?" "Really! What are you studying?" etc., all while I'm holding my hand out with the toll ready, and with a grimace on my face as I gave my curt responses. Meanwhile cars are piling up behind me.
In other words: you do not "need people in those toll booths to greet people"!
You buy a sticker to put on the inside of your windshield. It costs ~32€ and is good for a year. With that, you can drive anywhere, without any further tolls. Switzerland has butt-loads of tunnels and bridges that they have to maintain, and their autobahns are some of the best I have ever driven on. They are probably cleaner than most surgical operating room in the world.
In Italy, they have some kind of electronic subscription sticker system that lets you get through the toll booths fast. Or you can just shove in your EC bank card or credit card at unmanned booths. They do have folks at a few toll booths. On my last trip there, I saw that a lot of tourists would hold up maps, and ask the toll collector for advice. So maybe tossing the human element out is not such a great idea.
In Germany there are no tolls, and on a lot of the autobahns, no speed limit. Their autobahn motto is: "Drive fast, die young, leave a beautiful, mangled corpse."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
And you need people waving red flags in front of the cars, too.
This will happen once the DHS decides they need to track you everywhere you go and makes the EZ pass mandatory. But don't worry, it will be 'free', paid for by productive Americans i.e. taxpayers.
$70,000 per worker is a bit excessive. I can't come up with $30,000 in operating expenses per worker either.
And how about all the people who don't update their registration when they move? Rental cars?
And what do you do if the bill isn't paid? Suspend the registration? Cali can't do that to out of state plates or plates from Canada/Mexico.
I wonder if the added bureaucracy and paperwork for collections is going to nullify the gains they make by not collecting at the bridge.
I have to return some videotapes...
Take a look at Locans and Tourists #3: San Francisco, a map of geotagged photos of San Francisco based on a 'tourist' vs 'resident' heuristic (tourists take photos all at once; residents take them over a period of months). San Francisco is a divided city.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The MTA is removing the barrier gates at E-Z Pass lanes on the Henry Hudson Bridge this month, and there was some chatter in the NY papers about that bridge going to totally electronic toll collection sometime in the next 2-3 years.
Personally, I think the union will fight it tooth and nail, and they'll bring up the Homeland Security angle of having human eyes at toll booths to catch bad actors.
Why? What have they done. Or is it because they are the minions of the people who put the rules in place? In that case, is it OK to hate the military people for doing the same?
Because then I am confused, because I admire what they do but hat why they do it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
So what happens when someone decides to borrow other peoples plates? The problem I see with this is a transponder you choose to put in your car, otherwise you go through the toll booths and pay your money. Either way it's hard to get incorrectly charged. Now borrow someone else's car or just their plates and drive back and forth across the bridge repeatedly. If I recall correctly CA only requires a rear plate, but most the neighboring states require front and back, so you could get away with borrowing someones plate for the duration of your vacation, then return their plate. At the end of the month they get the bill when they were never even in the state of CA. And when they fight the charges the photographed vehicle is one they've never owned. Therefore this should be unconstitutional because you can't prove the owner of the vehicle actually drove across the bridge. It's too easy to spoof.
Take a tip from that transporter guy. Doesn't his car flip license plates or some nonsense at a press of a button? :D You save money AND time.
Camera snaps the picture.... and the bill is mailed to.... no one!
I love when movies actually teach us something.
I mean sex changes for mentally ill people (mo's) aren't free. I've drove through SF/G. Gate a few times and its nothing special... other than a deviant utopia.
Saving all the money means more union bosses get a raise, more mo's get chop-a-dick-offa-me's... why would you NOT want to drive over that bridge 50-60 times a day??
What's wrong with hatting the military?
No, I don't need a human face or to be greeted by somebody who's been sitting in a cramped booth and mechanically greeting people for months. Ew.
It's a frickin' bridge, not a hotel.
Why? What have they done. Or is it because they are the minions of the people who put the rules in place? In that case, is it OK to hate the military people for doing the same?
Because then I am confused, because I admire what they do but hat why they do it.
I don't drive (or live in the USA), but I would assume its less what they've done and more the simple fact that they are the person who is there preventing them from getting to work/home/other faster because they have to stop and wait. It is the toll collector who is slowing down their journey (or it may be perceived that way). I wont try to think of an example of a soldier's action that you would dislike them for doing for risk of hyperbole.
TL;DR: I doubt its personal, its just they're the one who is there doing it (like how people get annoyed at someone in a call centre).
But don't worry, it will be 'free', paid for by productive Americans i.e. taxpayers.
Free? Where's the profit in that? In Germany we recently had an increase from 8€ to 29€ (plus another 8-16€ for pictures that can only be used for IDs) for our ID card, which is mandatory to have by law. Just imagine the benefits to businesses with ties to corrupt politicians if they can force citizens to pay them as much as they want by law!
It costs more to collect the money then it does to hire employees to collect the fares.
We have boothless tolling now, and here are the directions to get anywhere: First, find the shortest route to the tollway, then go wherever you want. It is amazing, cut my commute from 1.5 hours to 24 minutes. Speaking as an entitled middle class asshole, I 3 tollways.
Tracking your every move, inside our coast-to-coast prison.
Your papers, please!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
No what would happen if your suggestion was honestly considered by politicians is this. They would eliminate toll roads, and add a new tax on all of the citizen incomes to cover the roads than they are now. However, with even more money available than before, the roads would be maintained even less than they are now for some odd reason. And, over time the money would get mismanaged and re-appropriated to their own private projects, completely unrelated to the road system, and funnel that money to their best buddies for favors, positions, perks, etc. Then, they would decry that the roads have no funding and would reinstate toll roads to solve it but in the process fail to remove the road tax itself. As a result, you now get double taxed for more poorly maintained roads, and the politicians in the meantime have three or four homes in several vacation states and ownership in various golf courses, oil companies and sports teams. Congratulations on solving the problem buddy.
Once the tolls are automated, the tolls can be increased more frequently and with less outrage from the motorists. Of course the politicians like the idea. They'll sell the idea on convenience, and then soak people later.
I don't care about your karma, I don't care about what's hip. --Weird Al
The newest bridge here in Vancouver, the Golden Ears Bridge, uses electronic tolling. It's the first toll bridge in these parts since tolls were abolished on other bridges in the 1960s. I don't use it enough to justify a transponder. Translink send me a bill for a few dollars every 3 months. Since it goes from nowhere to nowhere, nobody uses it much at all: it's almost always deserted. It's a handy landmark for the Pitt Meadows Airport, though the actual reporting point when approaching from the east is Hammond Mill, on the river right by Port Hammond.
The new Port Mann Bridge will use the same setup. Unlike Golden Ears, it is a major part of the road network. It only took them 40 years of gridlock to decide it needed upgrading.
I don't mind electronic tolling, actually. It saves having to fumble for change. My company's head office is in Dallas, not far from the George Bush Turnpike. Last time I got a rental car with a transponder, but the system didn't seem to recognize it.
...laura
Is local news something that Slashdot wants to seriously put on it's front page? It's sort of like saying the WW2 history museum in New Orleans is going to repaint the building from one shade of gray to a different one. It's just not front page news and a low point for this site.
That's all good as long as they make it visitor friendly. I hate being relegated to the non-FasTrack ghetto while passing through Orange County California.
I think the situation is different with a national landmark unless they want a bunch of rental car companies getting bills in the mail everyday.
Overall I dislike FasTrack and the ability of a private company to give out traffic fines.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
If it's such a good idea of the Golden Gate Bridge board of directors by saving so many millions of dollars, they left out what they can contribute to the good of the Golden Gate Bridge. They can lay off themselves as well, and hire 1 single director, keep the entire maintenance crews, rehire the laid off toll takers as maintenance personnel. These people are heartless shits, saving money on the backs of the workers and commuters only to support a heavily subsidized and totally failing ferry system. This is America folks.
Tolls waste a lot of time and money in an attempt to spread the cost of the road to the people that 'use' it, but this doesn't work. Everyone benefits from the road system. Even if you don't own a car, the goods and services you use rely on them. Adding tolls just increases the cost of those goods and services, so the entire toll industry is a waste of time. Just tax people evenly for the roads we all rely on and skip the wasteful toll booths and electronics.
Quite the opposite. After a certain point roads start being congested because, while it takes time in traffic to move, the road is "free" and so people use it. There's been a growing voice in Toronto, Canada saying that tolls should be introduced: we have some of the worst traffic jams (worse than LA), and stretches of Highway 401 get over 500,000 cars an hour (the busiest in the world).
The cost of all the delays of traffic, and the increased commute time for people, is coasting the economy several billion dollars in productivity. And given that Toronto is the largest economic area in Canada, it probably has some consequences nation-wide.
So tolls are probably are unnecessary on most roads, but after a certain point you need them to moderate road use to below saturation levels.
The same is true of parking: check out the book "The High Cost of Free Parking" on numerous examples of how introducing paid parking improved the situation for drivers (available spots), pedestrians (less pollution from people circling the block), and local businesses (more turn over of spots allow more customers to get in and out).
34 jobs over 8 years at around 20k/year each is ~5.5M, do maintenance and power costs really make up the other ~14M? Where does the rest of the money from the 19.2M go?
What's wrong with hatting the military?
Nothing really. A bit redundant in all, they already have hats. But if you insist....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Near Toronto, we use an all electronic toll system for the "407" highway. It has no toll booths but requires a transponder or the system photographs the plate and sends you a bill. Of course if they have to do the photo thing, then they charge you extra so it can be argued that you are forcing people to either pay extra for a transponder or extra for a photo toll, which of course is a bad thing. But like any big steel bridge over salt water, it needs alot of maintenance in order to keep it from rusting into a heap. If they can save money by implimenting this system its probably better in the long run. The cheaper the overall bill, the lower the taxes for the guy driving over the bridge (and hypothetically lower tolls as well).
What if you're a visitor with an out of state car, or a rental car?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
In a lot of places it is also a highly unionized job. They can't be fired and often can't be bothered to do their job. It makes a slow process of driving through a toll booth even more painful when you have to wait for someone to get off their phone call to bother with your fare.
t
Every year in California we buy a sticker to put on our car, and it costs on average $220 (depending on the car). Plus we have to pay gas tax. Plus we have to pay tolls (electronic and manual). Plus we have to pay ticket tax (parking, red light and jaywalking fines given out in excess of $300. literally millions of tickets issued a year)
In Germany there are indeed tolls for many of the private roads. Plus they do have tolls on public roads for commercial vehicles.
70 grand a year sweet government gig gone
Why? What have they done. Or is it because they are the minions of the people who put the rules in place? In that case, is it OK to hate the military people for doing the same?
Because then I am confused, because I admire what they do but hat why they do it.
First, when since does anyone need a rational reason to hate someone else? I am not saying that's right - but it is sadly the way this reality of human existence works. That aside, (and to the irrational), there are people who take out their frustration on those they idiotically think are responsible for such. So, waiting on line for minutes to pay a toll, and the toll collector becomes the target of the person's ire - kinda like shooting the messenger. It does not make sense, but it does happen.
One should never judge how someone else is going to act by attaching rationality to the incident. Not in such an irrational world filled with so many irrational people. Heck, look at the people who loved Microsoft BoB and Windows ME... ;-)
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
In a lot of places it is also a highly unionized job. They can't be fired and often can't be bothered to do their job. It makes a slow process of driving through a toll booth even more painful when you have to wait for someone to get off their phone call to bother with your fare.
I am pretty sure it's unionized here too (at least in the NYC Metro Area where I live). But, ironically, some of the nicest and friendliest people I have met have been toll collectors. Whether it's because I needed quick directions, or they simply took the time to smile, say hi and wish me a good morning, that has generally been my experience. Combine that with the fact that we are talking the NYC area, where being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every New Yorker's God given right, and their (friendly) attitudes are actually pretty impressive.
waiting on the whooshes directed at some of the responses I am sure I am going to get... ;-)
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
aw, nevermind.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
Just because you're necessary doesn't mean you're important and You probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon.
Yes, but how do they prove that the owner was responsible for the toll? I think that's a very important point seeing as the owner isn't the one that's necessarily driving and it's the driver that's responsible for paying. Beyond that there's always going to be issues with lost mail.
So, while my point about the NRVC is accurate, I missed the obvious issue that California is not a member of the NRVC. However, they do belong to the Driver License Compact. Most states belong to both the DLC and the NRVC:
Map of DLC/NRVC Member Jurisdictions
As you can see from the linked map, the net result is that your home state will yank your license if you ignore a traffic citation from California unless you are from Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Tennessee, or Wisconsin. If you live in one of those states and receive a citation from California you will find that you will likely have to post bail to the Californian police officer at the time of your citation.
The US toll industry needs to standardize on one national transponder. There's a multi-state one for trucks, but the California system pre-dates it and isn't compatible.
Does the EU have a EU-wide toll device? At least the Schengen Area should have one.
Yes, but how do they prove that the owner was responsible for the toll?
Simple. Change the law. Now, the registered owner is responsible for paying the toll.
Be sure to file those papers right away when you sell a car, and keep a copy to prove that the transfer occoured before the toll was incurred. Rental agencies will simply add a clause to the agreement allowing them to bill your credit card for any tolls incurred while you were renting the car.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
I can think of two in the US:
1. We tax diesel fuel more heavily than gasoline, because most of the diesel users in the US are trucks, which are heavier and do more damage to the roads. This has unfairly discouraged diesel for smaller vehicles.
2. Any vehicle that doesn't use taxed fuel is not paying for the roads. Very small problem now, will get bigger as all-electric cars become more practical.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
So.. Some asshole wants another human being to spend their working life sitting in a small filthy booth sucking exhaust fumes and having people grumpily throw change at them so *he* can have the ego boost of having a peon "greet" him before he zooms across the bridge? Wow.
By my calculations ($19.2/8 year/34 people) that's $70K/year!
The toll collectors there have an attitude! I profoundly thank them every time I give them my money, and they do not say thank you at all. One yelled at me: "Too far": I guess it meant that she thought my car was to far from her. It was actually absolutely convenient for her to take the bill, since I reach out of the window and was handing it to her. I told her: I am handing you the money, ma'am, please take it! - since I was afraid she'd send me an $30 ticket for toll evasion. The rudeness that I have to face handing my money and being their customer to them is increasing, proportionate to the speed that America is sinking into a 3d world country status.
Ok, I understand the "human face" issue, and agree partly. I get a human checkout person at the supermarket if at all possible, for instance. But there's two issues here:
1) The GG bridge has been running at capacity for years, and a redesign to carry more traffic (a second deck, for instance) would ruin it's value as a symbol and monument. And it'd be ugly.
2) As anyone who lived in the area can tell you, toll booths are SLOW. It's the major cause of the twice-daily jam on the bridge.
I think losing the booths trumps redesigning the bridge or putting up with the traffic. I'm sure there's some other low-training high-paying government job they could be doing.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Lots of US systems link up with EZ-Pass, especially here in the Northeast.
That having been said, there isn't that much incentive for a nation-wide system, especially when the technology remains proprietary. If we don't have competition between the systems, we're going to get massively gouged. Similarly, while it would be nice to have nation-wide standards, the benefits for me as a Northeasterner of anything west of New York being on the same system are incredibly minimal.
The ______ Agenda
If they were naughty hot Asian minxes wearing next to nothing at the booth... OK, I'm happy with that... I'll gladly stop on my way to work for a wink, and a "hey, baby -- put your money in here..."
But, these are not the kinds of people that sign up for toll booth jobs. Instead, we have humpty dumpty, or some old woman with either a confused or grumpy expression on their face... And why wouldn't they be grumpy... They flat-out /know/ that their job requires absolutely no creative thought and can absolutely be done better by a robot... The moment of enlightenment that these poor people experience when they finally understand that they have thrown their lives away on a job so mechanical and worthless -- that has to be a soul-crushing.
So, I'm all for this. Maybe the people who sat on their lazy butts not only contributing a pittance to the human condition, but actually wasting others time and energy in the process, will learn to redeem themselves and take upon themselves the challenge of bettering society.
"I see the strongest and the smartest men who have ever lived... and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables." ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 19
There are portion, short, with no speed limits that but they are surrounded by random portion with limits.
So you can't legally travel from one side of Germany to the other at 240 km/h.
About the Swiss stickers. Some people collection them on their car. Putting the new one next to the old ones. Others remove them. Like the car tax sticker in UK, they are designed to destroy themselves during removal.
Belgium will probably introduce a sticker like Switzerland for cars and a kind of GPS tracker for Trucks.
Tollways in Dallas-Fort Worth, TX have done away with all toll booths and replaced them with cameras too. They'll mail you a bill for the tolls on a periodic basis, though you can still get a toll tag (RFID?). We don't live there but were driving on the tollways over the holidays. We have yet to receive a bill as we live out of state. So, depending on how accurate the system is, you may or may not get a bill. We'll pay it if it ever shows up.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Be sure to file those papers right away when you sell a car, and keep a copy to prove that the transfer occoured before the toll was incurred.
I don't know how it works in California, but in New York you keep the plates when you sell a car. If that's the case in California then the system is going to have a pretty hard time photographing your license plates when they're sitting in your garage waiting to be returned.
Interesting. Honestly curious Brit here - I know that US employees suffer lower levels of personal income tax than in the UK (or Europe) but I'm wondering if your employers pay more?
Probably not.
US employers don't contribute anything toward the personal income tax of the employees. This is obfuscated by the fact that employers in most cases are required to withhold from payroll several taxes that are obligations of the employee. These include estimated* personal income tax (federal, plus state and local as applicable) plus the actual Medicare tax and actual employee's share of the Social Security tax. Instead of being paid directly to the employee, all such taxes are withheld from gross pay, and paid directly by the employer to the Internal Revenue Service on behalf of each employee.
The employer's only payroll tax liability is its share of the Social Security tax for each employee. For decades this has been split 50-50 between employer and employee, although just this year the employee's portion was reduced. Employers must also pay for several statutory insurance policies, including federal and state unemployment programs, plus in most cases a workers' compensation plan, but none of these is strictly a tax.
(*The fact that it's an estimate greatly confuses people on a mass scale, as they've been conditioned to believe that the interest-free return of any overages withheld is a gift from the government, and thus some even attempt to deliberately increase withholdings to achieve a bigger return, but that's another story entirely.)
At first I resisted the e-Toll/FlowToll system in Brisbane, Australia, not wanting to pay for previously cheaper trips, however, after a bunch of massive cross city tunnels where built, with my hands held behind my back, I ordered a visa debit card so that I could then subscribe to the Flow system.
The fuel/frustration/time saved on bypassing the city via tunnel, particularly during peak hour as well as the gateway bridge and the other toll ways around Brisbane, is *sometimes* worth the $4-5 toll. As a matter of fact, to justify the rediculous cost of the drill bit used to make the CLEM7 tunnel, there are at least a couple of other tunnels now in the works along the cities major arteries. In Brisbane, it has certainly been too little to late. Our public tranport infrastructure, while improving over the past 5 years, is still a long way short of the highly efficient light rail solutions working so well in overseas capitals, so any tunnel to get more cars off the congested CBD roads is now welcome as far as I am concerned.
Additionally, my Flow tag can be used on the tollways in Sydney and Melbourne, so regardless of the state I am driving in on the eastern coat of Australia, I can pay my toll with my Flow tag, without stopping.
http://www.flowtoll.com.au/page/Home
Come on SanFran, get with the times :)
Free? Where's the profit in that? In Germany we recently had an increase from 8€ to 29€ (plus another 8-16€ for pictures that can only be used for IDs) for our ID card, which is mandatory to have by law. Just imagine the benefits to businesses with ties to corrupt politicians if they can force citizens to pay them as much as they want by law!
If it's mandatory, then it's a tax. In this case, a flat tax (which hurts the lower paid more)
What stupid nonsense is this "needing a human face." As other posters have mentioned it is a waste of time, a waste of money, not to mention the pollution caused by idling. And we don't need a police state where Big Brother knows where we are at all times. Let's get rid of these tolls on bridges and collect the money via gas taxes.
Let's make the gas taxes pay for the roads and bridges. There was an interesting spoof I read about this fanatical desire to keep irrelevant jobs that harm the economy. Do a search on the ditch-diggers fallacy.
I just did: http://theclassicalliberalblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/ditch-diggers-fallacy.html
cameras to read license plate numbers of cars lacking the cards.
Will people with non-US cars (Mexican, Canadian) get to cross the bridge for free? And what about rental cars?
Why not have a number of dedicated FasTrak toll lanes, and a couple of lanes with human toll collectors (like is done on French motorways, and probably elsewhere too). Moreover, this will allow for a gradual reduction of the toll collector's workforce, rather than having to fire everybody at once...
So glad to hear they will be lowering tolls to reflect the savings!
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut.
Not everyone wants to.
There is nothing soul crushing about doing the job to which are best suited.
We are currently overcompensating some segments of our society because the wealthy have (temporarily) built a ring around certain jobs and then are passing them on to their children. It won't hold. There just is no value to paying a CEO 100 million dollars when the similar CEO in china or india is doing just as good a job for 1 million dollars a year.
Overcompensating them makes people envy them even tho they would be unhappy in those jobs.
There are lots of people of low to average IQ who are happy with a relatively mindless job surrounded by pleasant work buddies.
But you are right- those jobs can be automated. (and are being automated). The end result will not be that those people suddenly become smarter, talented, and capable of doing jobs that require high intelligence or talent.
So what happens to them when their jobs are automated away and there are no other jobs to go to?
They can vote or swing a club or shoot a gun perfectly well. They'll get unhappy when they have nothing to do- no money to spend- and folks act like it's their fault.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
So all I need is a little shutter curtain that drops down over my plate that the instant of crossing and I'm home free. Or a James Bond style revolving license plate on my Lotus (ha).
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The REAL CRIME here is that the Golden Gate bridge is still collecting tolls at all, let alone such high ones. The original mandate to collect tolls to pay off the bridge construction and maintenance expired long ago. However, this was such a lucrative pot of money to the San Francisco liberals that they felt the unquenchable need to Do Good with, that instead of reducing or eliminating the tolls once the need for them was met, they RAISED the tolls and dumped it into a shush fund of liberal activism. A sane society would have thrown the bums out long ago, but this is San Francisco that we're talking about.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
But what if you'd rather pay in cash?
When the bill arrives in the mail, put cash in the reply envelope.
What if you're a visitor with an out of state car,
States have access to the license plate data from other states. The bill will be sent to the owner of the license plate.
or a rental car?
The rental car companies will deal with this the same way that they deal with parking tickets and red light tickets. Forward the bill/ticket to the person who had rented the vehicle on that particular day.
"cutting 34 jobs" but wait that is a bad thing according to every politician. They are always saying we need to create more jobs
or a rental car?
The rental car companies will deal with this the same way that they deal with parking tickets and red light tickets. Forward the bill/ticket to the person who had rented the vehicle on that particular day.
After adding a massive handling charge.
I remember reading "toll booth operator" as one of the top 20 worst jobs to work in. Sitting in the middle of fifty idling cars will wreak havoc on your lungs. (Although if the authorities really gave a shit they could pipe in air to each toll booth using air sucked in from a more remote location. Or give them a mask connected to said air line.)
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
As much as I hate the "user pays" toll system at least this is one thing they got right in Australia. I can drive for 20 hours down the highway into a different state / city, using a transponder from a different company than the one running the toll road, on a bridge owned by a different private or public entity and it will just happily beep. I travel a lot and haven't seen a toll booth in about 3 years (I think the Gateway Bridge was the last to go electronic 3 years ago).
Apparently when electronic systems were first rolled out it was utter chaos with no interoperability.
'This is a world-famous bridge, and you need a human face,' says Philip Hynes.
My personal experience was:
No signs warning it was a toll. When we got right up to it, we saw there was a toll and it was cash only. We didn't have any cash so looked for somewhere to turn around. There wasn't anywhere. We pulled up to the booth and explained the situation, the knuckledragger didn't actually say a word to us. He just noted our license plate and waved us on.
OK, we figured. That's not too unpleasant a system. They'll send us a bill for the couple of dollars in the mail, maybe a website we can go to pay it on.
No. We got a $30 fine for running the toll. The toll we stopped at, explained we didn't have cash but were happy to pay any other way or would turn around if that wasn't OK.
Not only that but the fine notice allows you to not pay for a first offense IF you sign up for their automatic payment system... a system that deducts the first month to cover that alleged infraction and insists on pre-billing you, keeping more than the cost of the fine for future payments.
So, after we talked to the knuckledragger, thought we were just being offered an alternate way to pay, got waved on by him, then FINED for toll evasion? I, for one, will be dancing to the thought of his lost job. I'm sure he's well qualified for a role with the TSA so he won't be unemployed for long.
Yes, without a human there, there'll be no way to explain situations like that to an unfeeling machine. But when the humans were worthless examples of the species to begin with, monosylabic and leading you in to fines when you thought you'd simply asked for help? Precisely nothing will be lost.
Bitter? Me? ;)
There's no shortage of things worth doing out there - always someone who'd like their house cleaned, or to have a massage, or a have a wall painted or their dog walked. People don't end up jobless because there's nothing worth doing any more, they end up jobless because the economy has failed to arrange for useful things to be done and for someone to be given the right incentives to do it. That doesn't mean it's easy to solve, but having people do something fundamentally pointless instead isn't going to get you there.
Holy Mackarel! It's the 21st Century already. We've had EZ Pass in the Philadelphia area for at least 8 years now. No one ever missed the toll booths. Then EZ Pass was installed in the length of I-95 to Baltimore and Washington DC. It must of cut out a good 30 minutes off of that horrendous trip.
Whatever happened to all that crap about San Francisco being so forward looking?
In California, the plates go with the car -unless they are special vanity plates or the like.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
Anyone mind if I take a picture of your license plates?
In Adelaide, South Australia we have no tolls, something we are used to here.
Whenever tolls are talked about with a new project everyone cries and it gets scraped. The downside is that we pay quite a lot in fuel (tax) and registration (insurance mostly) but if you ride a bike your laughing.
Anyway aren't they suppose to take away tolls once the project is paid for?
Well then, save even more money and remove the tolls all together, zero cost solution. It will save even more pollution as people do not need to drive further to free bridges to avoid tolls. Unless of course the real idea is to sell all US bridges to private interests so that an automated maximum profit system can be implemented on every bridge in the US. The Republicans will love it, think of all those campaign donations those billions in profits could pay for (real trick is to do zero maintenance and then on sell the sell the bridge just prior to collapse).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
We currently have bastard red light/speeding cameras in our area. The registered owner, local or not, gets the ticket. It is not a criminal ticket. The only negative is that they throw it to a collection agency. No big deal for me as I don't borrow any money anyway.
http://thegazette.com/cameras and you can peruse the database to see all the out of state tickets. It has been a gigantic moneymaker for the City, and for the company that does the cameras.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
What TFA is about (going from the newspaper article I read about it this morning, not TFA) is getting completely rid of the toll collectors and toll booths and just billing everyone by license plate.... which doesnt work for new car tags, rentals, people borrowing/stealing someone else's car or altering their tags, or out-of-state travelers driving through (I doubt they have authority to track down their address from the other state's DOT for billing). I agree with the motion, need to move to fully automated booths, but mailing bills is not the answer. Put up kiosks that take bills, coins, or credit card swipes, they would work faster than the toll booth operators we have now, that sometimes will let you sit there while they count out bills and swap stacks around before taking your exact change...
Whats not mentioned is the other bay area bridges, the golden gate is only the most famous of them. The oakland/bay bridge (the one that collapsed in the Loma Prieta quake), San Mateo hwy 92 bridge (once the longest bridge in the world, now 25th), Dumbarton, and Richmond bridges are also toll, and will also probably see the same elimination of toll booth operators.
-Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that tollbooths and toll collectors, a fixture at the Golden Gate Bridge since it opened in 1937, will be eliminated starting in 2012 as the bridge moves to an all-electronic system, freeing 34 people to do more useful work and saving $19.2 million over the first eight years.
Much better way to put it.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Most of the world works in such jobs. Having a fulfilling job that earns you respect is an ideal that few attain. And I can think of many, many worse jobs than toll collector.
1) How will the District be able to collect tolls from drivers in new vehicles? There is no license plate available to the cameras.
2) How will the District collect tolls from out-of-state vehicles? If I have an Oregon or Florida car, I'll just sail right through and ignore any bill that I receive.
3) Who's going to send out the bills to the people whose license plates were captured by photo driving through the toll area without a FasTrak? Apart from the postage, how much will that cost per driver? Will they have to hire back the toll takers to send out these notices? The number of cars without a FasTrak is pretty high.
4) Who's going to open up all of the envelopes that contain the payment checks? Toll takers can collect about 5-6 fares per minute. It takes longer to open and sort envelopes.
5) Who's going to follow up on the bounced checks? That takes time, too.
In all, my sense is that the switch away from human toll takers is likely to result in lower revenues and higher costs for the District. They'll have to hire all of the toll takers for the manual tasks, and then some more people. Overall, it looks like a terrible business decision, even apart from the human costs.
Never mind other states, what about non-US registered cars? I'd imagine this mainly means us Canadians but I have seen the odd European number plate on US roads. Since they won't be able to find out who owns the vehicle thanks to Canadian and European privacy laws does this mean we get to cross for free?
Then, they are /forced/ to be creative! Right now they are undoubtedly "overcompensated" by your own admission. But I disagree with you -- damn it! I disagree! I think it is a shame that people who are innately gifted in some way throw their lives away at sucky jobs like this. And sucky -- so sucky that it WASTES OTHERS LIVES IN THE PROCESS!!!
There are /always/ other more creative or beneficial jobs out there.
You know who is the most valuable person in the Wal-Mart store? It's the greeter. No Robot could ever take that job! That person should be the most coveted person in the store. Why? Because it's that person that is the first person that you see and it's that person's job to make you feel welcome to come in and spend your money for whatever crap they sell there.
Does it take great skill to do that job? Well, it SHOULD. It takes skill to be that happy smiling person that you want to see -- that tells you exactly where to find a person find your crap wherever it is in the store -- that knows what you are buying is crap and that you the customer know is crap, but it's darned cheap crap and you're happy to buy it because, after all, it's darned cheap crap.
Some of these people as well could be artists. And some.. some could be scientists... What was Einstein before he became a world renowned nuclear genius of relativity? He was a patent examiner. Truly a step above booth babe/bozo... but really.
I truly thing you underestimate people. I think you need to take a long look in the mirror and ask yourself why you don't believe in people, and why you don't believe that the market will have a place for them. You think that they are so stupid that they will never amount to anything more?
Wow, I thought I was bad just for saying what I felt.
You know... I have some experience here. I worked in Asia as an Expat. Here's what I learned...
Companies outsource for "cheap labor." But there are some companies that outsource jobs that take "skill" or "education." You know what you find out about the companies that do this? They invest in what ends up to be a "revolving door." They end up getting what they paid for in terms of support. They get the bottom of the barrel. Why? Because, when a person that works in that environment for any time learns something valuable, they CHANGE JOBS SO FAST THAT YOU CAN'T FIGURE OUT WHAT HIT YOU.
I think it's not that people work in dead end jobs out of choice... I think it's their political systems that cage them in those jobs. People should fight to be creative, but they are told that they should just do what they are told by their government that they will get a pension and be all right.
Well, excuse me but that's _not_ all right. People are meant to do more than let me screw a widget in this piece of crap the same way over and over again! People shouldn't be satisfied to mechanically do anything! Robots do that. Humans DON'T -- for very long, unless they are brainwashed into it, or overly compensated into doing it!
San Francisco is a major tourist attraction, there is no doubt. The toll booths are just another way of getting more money from the tourists. But there is another aspect to this. Lots of people want to live in moron county, and commute to SF or even to Silicon Valley. I don't know what the toll is these days. I do remember once it was $3. Lets see 5 days a week, four weeks a year, that $60 a month. As if gas wasn't enough of an expense for the hardworking locals, with the strained economy, a $60/month additional expense just worsens the pain. And add to that the cost of parking in the city. Now employers in San Francisco have to pay their employee more to offset the travel, toll, and parking fees. That doesn't make SF as attractive a place to have a business. Having lived and operated a business in SF before, a remember vividly commuting from the North Bay, over the bridge, and working my way to Noe Valley to do my days work. Eventually I just burned out on the commute and started working from home in Tiberon. The company grew and relocated to South San Francisco because business locations were prohibitively expensive in SF, on top of everything else. The lack of a BART transit from the North-West Bay to the City causes massive commuting by automobile. Ride sharing helps, but it is still a glut of cars doing the daily transit, and the time wasted at the slow toll area is just more overhead time the employee has to tolerate for the sake of being employed.
So what I want to know is if they will replace the one toll with one set of cameras/Fastrak (which basically covers a round trip across the bridge and back) or put one in for each direction. (Yes, in the old days, we had to pay each way until someone got the bright idea of charging double, but just at one end.) If you want to travel from say San Jose, to Santa Rosa and back, and you don't care which way you go, you can pay no tolls at all. By going north through San Francisco and the Golden Gate bridge, and coming south through the Richmond/San Rafael bridge and Oakland, you get the "free" direction on each of those bridges, sort of a toll loop hole. I hope they don't decide to close that.
Many people resent paying to use a road that they have already paid for. People resent being lied too more.
For example, the expressways around Chicago are almost without exception "Tollways".
When the roads were initially opened, the public was told that the roads would only be toll roads until the construction had been paid for, and then after that the roads would be free to use.
It was a bald-face lie. Decades later, the tollways are still collecting money, and Tollway Commission fatcats are still being driven around in limos which don't have to pay tolls.
Who wouldn't hate that?
Putting moderation advice in your
Yes, they could do all those millions of vacant jobs that employers are desperate to fill.
I heard an urban legend that when automated toll booths were added to a certain highway that runs north from Montreal, eliminating toll booth operators, that their revenues went up by 30%. That's not too shabby.
Back to the subject at hand, though...
The GG Bridge toll is now $5-6, depending on the time of day. A fair amount (15%?) of that is out-of-staters and drivers of rental cars, many of whom drive across the bridge Northbound to the vista point on the Sausalito side, then drive under the bridge to return to the City Southbound through the toll booths. The word will quickly get out about the toll system, and most of those revenues will be lost. So I still think that taking away the human toll takers is a bad idea in every sense.
I agree that toll collection is extremely inefficient. This is just like parking meters. At first they were planned to help make extra money for inner city infrastructure, but now the parking meters basically just cover the cost of the parking meter enforcement and maintenance, so it became just a makework project.
If only there was a way to collect a tax in a centralized location base on the amount of wear and tear that a vehicle does and how many miles they drive. Oh wait, there is, we could charge a tax for every dollar of fuel sold. The more heavy vehicles buy more gas, and the ones that drive farther buy more gas, There is no need for expensive toll collectors or electronic pass infrastructure. All that crap needlessly escalates the cost of maintaining the roads, but they justify it as making jobs for people, basically middle class welfare.
Of course, by collecting taxes on fuel, electric cars get a free pass, but they usually are smaller cars and don't cause as much damage, so I am willing to give them their free pass. Perhaps in the future, there could be a tax on "fast charges" at electric fueling stations.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Just curious...
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm pretty sure the "real idea" is for people who actually use the bridge to pay for its construction and maintenance.