Toll signs on 101 report your transponder setting
rachelbythebay.com
rachelbythebay.com
He basically admitted to me that it's based on the honor system, he has no real way to enforce that the number is correct unless it's a convertible with the top down.
> Southern California has it too, but they call it "the" 101
I moved here 26 years ago but I still call it "the 101" (but I call all the other freeways by just their number, except the 5 because we have that in SoCal too). So yeah, I guess you can use it to detect I learned to drive in LA, but I've lived more than 1/2 my life here, so if I'm an invader, I'm definitely playing the long con!
So in the interest of penalizing someone who committed no safety infraction, only a financial one, we create a dangerous situation for everyone on the freeway, including the officer.
> In 1998, California Highway Patrol officer Scott Greenly was struck by a car and killed while issuing a ticket on the shoulder of Route 85; thereafter the portion between Quito Road and Prospect Road in the City of Saratoga was named the CHP Officer Scott M. Greenly Memorial Freeway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Route_85#Othe...
Regarding "the 101", I always wondered why it's "101" here and "the 101" in SoCal. According to an article I read, it's because the original Los Angeles area freeways didn't have numbers, just names: the Pasadena Freeway, the Ventura Freeway, etc. It only made sense to use "the". When they got numbers later, the habit of using "the" stuck around.
In the Bay Area, the freeways got numbers first. They do have names too (like the stretch of 85 mentioned above), but mostly no one uses their names or even know them. So there never was a habit of using "the" with the number.
I was a kid in the early 80s and back then all the traffic reports on the radio were still by freeway name, so I learned them all that way too.
It's up to the state to prove their case. I'd contest any such ticket with the truth. Likely these systems are profitable because people don't generally contest the ticket (or do so in ineffectual ways). Neither the private company nor the state wants any judge making a ruling that makes such tickets impossible to enforce. I'd expect it would get dropped before I'd ever have to talk to a judge, but even if not, unless they have clear evidence I am lying, they're probably going to lose in court.
That said in a way I don't think this system is too terrible. It's a little funny, but it's at least fairly simple. But it requires enforcement. I've done a lot of driving throughout California recently and it seems like half the people in carpool lanes shouldn't be there. And apparently I'm the last person in the state that doesn't roll across the solid double lanes whenever I feel like it. Never have I seen a cop care about this stuff.
I think it should be simple occupancy based only - vehicles with 3 occupants or more only.
"Poor people" already drive less than higher income people, are more likely to depend on public transportation and suffer the consequences of living near polluted highways. They will disproportionately benefit from anti-congestion policies like tolling highway lanes.
Would you be saying this if we were talking about high commuter rail fares or park fees that are used as a backhanded way to "class up the place"? Because that's basically what tolls are.
>"Poor people" already drive less than higher income people,
Not in the context of toll roads. They don't go an extra 5mi to whole foods. They don't take frivolous trips. But none of that is what tolls are trying to solve. Tolls are trying to solve peak commute hour demand. This is a use case where poor people wind up using roads (or any other form of transit) proportionately more than the wealthy because their jobs tend to be less flexible.
Yes, they drive proportionately less for cross-town type stuff and a little less for commuting (because you can't justify a long commute for a poorly paid job) but the ones that do drive don't deserve to be the first kicked off the road so a bunch of HNers can drive 5mph faster.
>They will disproportionately benefit from anti-congestion policies like tolling highway lanes.
What? What? Do you seriously believe this? Poor people benefit massively from reduced cost (in time, money and frustration) because their other options are more curtailed so being able to economically justify a trip to Walmart to save 10% over the local option (or whatever) or a different commute to a job that pays marginally more is of larger benefit.
Unsure if you're familiar with LA traffic patterns and driving habits, but that really isn't true. Except for living near polluted highways, that's true. If anything, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to commute further.
Big fat "citation needed" here. I'm pretty well off, and drive very little, because I can afford to live in a place where I can walk to most of my destinations, and I have an office-type job that lets me work from home (and not drive to an office), as opposed to working somewhere that requires me to be in person, like a service job.
At least in the bay area, the "poor people" you are talking about get pushed out of the main population centers, and have to commute longer and longer to get to their jobs. If anything, I would say "poor people" drive much more. But I expect this is also a function of location, and other factors.
I responded to a similar comment above, but I'll repeat it here. If we want people to share the same vehicle in those lanes we should probably just close it to everything but buses during rush hour and then actually put more buses on the road.
I agree some enforcement could improve things but then again I would guess this still increases carpooling just by the fact that most people do not want to worry about breaking the rules.
An interesting enforcement option might be to create a fastrack app or integrate even with Waze / other apps where each person in the car has to confirm they are where they say there are. It wouldnt need to be running a full constant GPS like navigating with turn by turn - just a few GPS pings at the start of your trip to confirm you are all in the same vehicle (or even by a quick local bluetooth ping of each others phones)
I guess if I'm honest I think the whole scheme is a silly way of getting people to share vehicles. Really we should probably just take the carpool lanes and make them exclusively usable by buses during rush hour and actually build out that form of transportation.
If we spent half as much money on better public transit in that corridor as we do adding lanes and building this ridiculous toll system, we might have something functional enough that a lot more people would use it.
Buses on highways tend to either have horrible bus stations in the median, which are often far from where you want to be and are incredibly noisy and riddled with pollution.
Or they have to go off the highway which requires either very expensive exclusive off-ramps, otherwise they get stuck behind all the other traffic on the highway which defeats the purpose.
I unfortunately think that 101 traffic in the bay area is pretty unsolvable. The main silicon valley area is incredibly low density and virtually unwalkable given the masses of parking lots.
I think the best option is to massively increase density next to Caltrain stations (which is starting to happen) and basically move all the development next to the train, rather than trying to build transit to the existing development.
Maybe new lines could be built on BART etc to make new corridors, paid for by big taxes from existing "sprawl" office developments far from transit to make them unattractive compared to higher density ones near train service.
It's frankly ridiculous that Apple Park was allowed to be built in its current form, for example. It's 3mi from Caltrain, has a ridiculous requirement for parking and is terrible land use wise (though it does look cool). It could have easily been a tower nearer transit, if it wasn't for NIBMYism.
i don't think it's really fair to blame the NIMBYs for that one. a sprawling, campus surrounded by a big buffer to keep it separate from the community is clearly what Apple wanted, not just what the city of Cupertino wanted. If they wanted to build something with more density and transit links that was integrated into the community, they could have.
Your website says you don’t live in the US and you did your education in NYC - so I feel like you might be really unaware of how this road operates and how many of these others operate…
I grew up in southern California and did my undergrad in the Bay Area. I've probably put around 100k miles of driving in California with myself behind the wheel and that includes the fact that I have been mostly been living outside California for more than a decade. Last time I drove through the Bay Area was a couple months back and I did in fact drive on the 101.
I'm not saying that my beliefs here are right, but I would recommend you consider the possibility that yours are wrong.
- they are very unsafe. pretty much danger is proportional to the speed difference between stopped traffic and the carpool lane.
- people pay extremely high taxes to use the roads in the first place, why monetize further?
- just opening the lane would decrease congestion for everyone
- all that new infrastructure to track and charge people costs money, how much overhead is there?
Monetize further = reduce needed taxes.
> - just opening the lane would decrease congestion for everyone
This is true iff they don't incentivize carpooling.
Where in Seattle is that true? I used to take the bus all the time before I got a car, but now it's hard to justify since the bus is usually 1.5-2x longer than by car...
For example from my apartment to Pike Place Market, Google Maps currently estimates 20 minutes by car and 37 minutes (if you don't miss any transfers!) by bus.
Adding lanes adds demand, and you get just as much (usually more!) congestion as before.
The demand is constant and does not change. You can only shuffle it around. You have a few choices:
1. Add lanes. This gives people the option to move to the suburbs with a long commute.
2. Build housing in urban areas. This gives people the option to live close to work without a commute.
3. Add public transportation connects the suburbs to the cities.
4. Massive homeless problem. This is because people cannot commute from the suburbs and cannot pay rent in the cities.
The government has the power to add lanes at the expense of smaller, more dangerous shoulders and medians. But the ability to add lanes only extends as far as the shoulders. For the most part, California has run out of shoulder in urban areas.
The government does not have the power to build housing because of NIMBYs.
Buses don't solve the problem of commuting between the suburbs and the cities. If you have to sit in traffic anyway, people will sit in traffic in their car. The government doesn't have the power to build light rail because that means tearing town existing structures, and again -- NIMBYs.
So massive homeless problem it is.
Demand fluctuates relative to amenities, jobs, goods, services available on either end of a thoroughfare. If people like the offerings in one metro area vs another, or in a suburb vs a larger city, more people travel to and from that place. If they have things they want to do in their own backyard, they do not do that. The distribution of all of those things changes over time because of course it does.
Thus the law of conservation of traffic flux is violated and none of your conclusions are sound.
Sure sounds like public transit design is a red herring, no? :o)
the better a drive is, the more people will do it. "the commute is actually okay" is the reason people buy houses in the suburbs. the people buying houses in the suburbs are the reason the commute becomes terrible. if the drive sucks, people will find a way to avoid it, whether that's finding recreational opportunities close to home, taking transit, buying a house in the city, or finding a job close to home (or working remote)
No, the reason they do it is to buy a house with three bedrooms and a yard for $225k instead of, say, paying $4000/mo for a shoebox they can never meaningfully aspire to own. The Commute is only a candidate reason they wouldn't make the move.
(And if large cities had sane housing policies and lots of supply, this all might be less of a problem, but, well, that's not our world.)
Speaking only for myself, I didn't buy a house in the suburbs because "the commute was ok", I bought a house in the suburbs because it was the only place I was able to purchase a place to live.
My rent on my 1-bedroom apartment near the city was $500 a month more than the mortgage+property taxes in the suburbs. The mortgage is constant, the house is appreciating value, some of the mortgage goes towards the principal and I "keep" that. The rent was going up 5-10% per year.
The commute was not ok. But I couldn't afford not to. $500 a month is $500 a month.
In the decade or so since, my house appreciated significantly in value, and I was able to purchase a house 5 minutes from work. But I could not have done that without sacrificing much of my sanity for a not-ok commute for nearly a decade.
The reality is that housing and traffic are deeply, deeply entwined.
https://ccag.ca.gov/us-101-express-lanes-project/
There's an effect called induced demand where adding more free lanes to a road actually increases congestion, not decrease. Traffic engineers in the bay area have studied this and found it would be the effect if they just opened the HOV lanes up to all traffic.
A toll expressway allows for relieving congestion on normal lanes without increasing road demand, and will pay for itself over time.
The problem with adding lanes to roads is not that people want you to work out instead of sitting in your car. Nobody really cares. The problems is that it doesn't scale, there isn't space to add enough lanes to get everyone into a car. Additional lanes come at the cost of making the road less suitable for walking and biking, further pushing people into their cars unnecessarily. Hence road diets; use expensive urban land for something other than holding slow-moving cars for 3 hours a day.
Car-centric suburbs were an interesting experiment that didn't work out. Unfortunately, half of America owns equity in the failed experiment, so it's going to be a rough couple decades while we adjust to something more sustainable. (Self-driving electric cars aren't going to save them.)
Whether or not you like cars, they're simply not sustainable. It's great that you have one and take advantage of the government subsidies, but it's not a thing that future generations are going to do.
And your other response above implies that road maintenance is bankrupting suburban cities, but it's entirely possible that those cities are simply not properly prioritizing/managing their spending, which is a common problem in California politics.
https://www.truthinaccounting.org/library/doclib/Financial-S...
Among most cities that declare, physical infrastructure is usually the least of their problems, it almost always is rooted in public employee pension guarantees that can't be met.
"Unfunded retirement liabilities are the main contributing factor to the $333.5 billion in city-level debt"
The two cities in the worst shape? NYC and Chicago, which are far more urban (and well-serviced by public transportation) than cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas or Anaheim which barely have any downtown urban core and are essentially just large glorified suburbs.
Propaganda about road engineering written by road engineers. Can you request these "studies"? Any data to share, post-project?
Induced demand is real, that's true. But the degree to which it changes things is highly suspect. Restricting a lane increases congestion in the other lanes. It encourages the far-left lane to make more extreme lane changes (people tend to stay in the fast lane as long as possible, then need to quickly cross 4 lanes to exit). And because it slows normal people down, it increases traffic on non-highways, which has a large number of negative issues: more severe accidents (head-ons and 90-degree impacts are quite rare on divided highways), more idling (more traffic at red lights, which then leads to more drivers having to wait 2 cycles), more pedestrian accidents and more traffic near schools, etc.
Artificial bottlenecks are not an improvement, if the true goal is to increase overall traffic throughput. If the goal is simply to raise revenue for the government, wink wink, then it works great.
In areas that are basically entirely car-dependent, the implication is that more roads encourage more journeys, and that fewer roads result in more journeys not taken. It's unclear why persuading people not to travel is inherently a good thing. Presumably they're going somewhere to see people and do things.
Perhaps building new roads doesn't help them do that any faster, but there are more people getting to do the things that they want.
As for your speed difference issue, at least in Southern California, the carpool lane has a double yellow separating it from the regular lanes, hopefully giving some added safety since cars shouldn't move back and forth except at designated entry and exit sections.
A lot of people think the purpose is to reduce pollution from the cars removed from the road (i.e. only one car's pollution instead of three), but in reality it should reduce pollution even MORE than that (because fewer cars on the road means everyone can drive faster, reducing the time spent with your car polluting while stuck in traffic).
However, they messed this up by adding these other ways to drive in the carpool lane. Sure, an electric vehicle pollutes less, but letting them drive in the carpool lane eliminates the benefit of fewer cars on the road; three electric vehicles still take up the same amount of space on the road and cause the same traffic as three gas guzzlers.
Then they added paying a toll, which does nothing to reduce pollution at all, and is simply a way to generate revenue. This is completely counter to the original purpose.
So if they stuck to the original idea, I think it is worthwhile. In the original form, converting the carpool lane to a regular lane would not actually reduce the congestion for everyone, because while you are adding a lane, you are also increasing the number of cars on the road (of course there are a lot of factors that go into this... how many cars would carpool anyway, and how many cars are using the carpool lane at any one time).
Here in Southern California, however, the carpool lanes are almost pointless. During high traffic times, they are just as congested as the regular lanes. In fact, they are often times slower than the regular lanes when congestion is medium... since they are only one lane and you can't switch lanes during most sections, you can end up with one slower car holding back everyone.
If I were confident that at least the money would go to road surface maintenance, I'd be partially okay with it. But I'm not, so this is even more ridiculous.
101 has some incredibly bad road surface stretches. 237 is 2 or 3 lanes for most stretches, and periodically there will be clusters of cars going 5-10mph under the limit and now I can't pass them unless I want to pay a Fastrak fee.
Mind-boggling, except that they know people here can "afford" it so they think it gives them free-reign to charge.
Just walk/bike/etc. is a form let them eat cake.
Ah, right. Caltrain is only on the inside, 101 corridor; also, last I checked it doesn't allow non-service animals. So...
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/03/03/flooding-on-highway-1...
US 101 in that stretch is actually part of the National Highway System and gets federal funding, though notionally all US highways are state highways with a national grid number.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/CA-237,+Milpitas,+CA/@37.4...
With a price, supply and demand can meet where traffic isn't jammed into standstill, and everyone is better off.
Sure, it would make sense for the money to go to road maintenance, but to me that's a minor issue.
Just designate one or two lanes as un-tolled HOV3 to encourage carpooling and leave it at that. Direct the funds for road-widening and toll schemes toward improving public transit.
Personal travel around the bay area (regardless of whether it's by car, bus, train, or boat) is abysmally embarrassing. Everything done since I moved here 18 years ago have been ineffectual band-aids.
[0] Yes, I know these options aren't available to everyone, at least not without significant personal or financial sacrifice, but I bet enough people to make a difference could actually make some useful changes.
> It just ends up being a regressive tax
I don't think it's useful to think of paying for goods or services as taxes, just because they're sold by a government entity.
I don't think of buying a Bart ticket or sending a package through USPS as a tax. They're not that different from buying a bus ticket from Greyhound or sending a package through FedEx.
I think it depends. Is the government holding a monopoly on the market? If so, it's a tax.
It's good to have a vocabulary!
That said I do find it amusing that if you drive up the I-5 up to Oregon, people suddenly know to keep the left lane clear as a passing lane as soon as you cross into Oregon. (But cross back into California and the _exact same cars_ in your pack will suddenly coast slowly in the leftmost lane.)
In the next 25 years, all the gas stations are going to close and all that gas tax revenue will need to be replaced, as that's how the roads are maintained. Gas tax is a usage tax, so to replace it with something equivalent, we'll need to be able to track our vehicle's road usage. Maybe cars will just self report, as new cars will just be a consumer electronics device with wheels and a broadband connection anyways.
But more than likely the solution will be backwards compatible one at first, like all the license plates becoming e-License plates, with eInk screens and a Fast-Trak style responder for tracking tolls.
Extrapolating on this, the idea that you could get into a vehicle and drive along public roads without those roads making a record of your passage is one that will slowly go away. Get used to it. Seriously.
Oregon tested GPS trackers as a way to track where those miles are driven and tax people accordingly (you could get a rebate on your tax paid at the pump). Understandably, people balked at having their driving tracked so closely and it never got out of the testing phase.
Now, with pretty much every new car having a tracker installed by the manufacturer, some state will surely try again.
On one hand they get a bunch of kickbacks for their reelection war-chest and some roads fail 5 years after their re-election is over anyway and someone else will be blamed for it. On the other hand they directly fund their opponent who is unlikely to turn down those dollars, possibly fail in their reelection bid, and successfully save some roads that everyone will just assume would have lasted anyway.
It's not hard to see that it's practically impossible for any other outcome, the system is practically designed to create this kind of situation.
The question is how to move the funds around, as state taxes and road funding stop at state borders, but vehicles don't. And of course states will have a patchwork of registration rules, and won't share money with each other. So the trucking industry will lobby some state to be a tax haven, and all trucks will just be registered there.
If only we had some sort of organization that allows states to solve issues that happen between states, like a larger government function...
I’ve seen numbers that state the road damage caused by one truck is equivalent to several ten thousand cars. (Usually numbers between 10k and 40k).
That seemed hard to believe when I first heard it, but the fourth power you mention is the explanation for that insane number.
Does this exist in the US? This has been going on for nearly 20 years here.
Seems the US has many more installed in police cars (which is rare in the UK) vs stationary ones, in general.
As with any time this question is asked, try to remember the US is the third largest nation in both geographic size and population, with 320 million citizens spread out over 50 quasi nation-states, a handful of which themselves are bigger than most countries, and all with their own legal systems. We share currency, an army, a flag and a constitution. The rest is a roll of the dice.
That said, at a Federal level, I've never heard of this and where I live in Northern California, I haven't heard of anything to that extent either. That doesn't mean it's not happening in some municipality in Michigan or Hawaii, or even in a different part of my own state. Though, honestly, I doubt it.
The way we do surveillance here is more roundabout: First we allow right wing news media to scare the shit out of all the old people in the country, who then go out and buy doorbell and other Wifi cameras and start live streaming every square inch of their property, 24/7. Then we either compel the bigco to give the government access to the feed, complete with gag order, or the NSA just hacks in and takes it anyways.
It seems to work well. Our video is all HD.
So yeah, where there are publicly run cameras like for traffic, that data is usually available to law enforcement without much trouble.
The systems exist to varying extent on a state by state basis, but they're mostly not used for mundane stuff because the American public even in the most boot-lickey states won't just roll over and take it when the .gov tries to use skynet to screw them out of extra money and the powers that be would rather use the systems sparingly than anger the public and get rules and laws that say they can't.
The tax amount would be a function of tire size since that correlates (via vehicle weight) with wear and tear on the roads.
To handle early replacement (flat tires, etc.), when tires are replaced, give a rebate based on remaining tread.
There would probably be a huge market for illegal tires (similar to illegal cigarettes), so that would require enforcement. You'd also need some way to stop tire theft. Maybe encode the vehicle's license plate number into a chip in the tire or something.
I dont personally oppose some tolls (like bridges or even this) but the gas tax (or modern equivalent) completely going away does not seem like it will happen.
I drove 205/580->680->880->237 daily for years, one of the first express corridors. People constantly crossing over the double-white line, intentionally exiting the lane at each transponder to skip tolls, driving on the shoulder, driving past a huge line of cars so they can bully their way in at the last moment. CHP seems to let most of that slide - they're busy with the massive accidents that constantly result.
I highly doubt they're going to care about 1 vs 2 vs 3, and I feel for them if they're expected to.
Lest you think I'm a saint, I got 4 tickets the year I moved away from Seattle alone.
On a normal day it can be tough to tell why people are getting pulled over though. You'd have to be able to observe the conditions and watch them get pulled over which is a pretty short window given the attention & timing factors.
I wonder if there are public stats on this. How many people are cited? Can we estimate the total number of violations somehow to get a rough percentage of people who actually get caught?
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-02-26/driver-u...
Conversely, driving the same through the peninsula I never saw any. It seems to be up to the discretion of the county/local cops to enforce, which isn't a conviction of the rule itself but really the enforcing authority.
Although, on the 91, I don't know that it uses transponder settings since there's a dedicated "3+" lane when you approach reading areas, which are situated right in front of CHP buildings (so they can see if you're really 3+?)
Merging not being allowed is still dangerous because people don't always follow the rules. It might even be more dangerous than lanes that always allow merging because then at least drivers in the faster lane can prepare themselves to expect merging.
A separated lane makes it impossible (or at the very least potentially damaging to the vehicle) to merge.
Here is an example of what I think is the ideal HOV setup[1]. There are two lanes so a single slow driver can be overtaken and there are physical dividers that prevent unexpected merging. You can also see the toll signs mentioned in the article that display the passenger number set on the transponders as discussed in the article.
[1] - https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9392023,-118.2796649,3a,75y,...
That's the case for many other highways with HOV lanes in NorCal as well.
I imagine the main difference is that most of these "open access" HOV lanes are time-limited; outside of the morning and evening weekday rush hours they're not HOV lanes. It makes more sense to have stronger separation for full-time HOV (or toll) lanes.
Of course you can only use it as an overtake lane in none-carpool hours, but now that’s not even an option.
>High-Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes, also known as carpool or diamond lanes
[1] - https://dot.ca.gov/programs/traffic-operations/hov#:~:text=W....
The issue here is that people choose it in an non-optimal way and thus it makes many people having to do a lot more to get around others.
And, yeah, the right lane is what I end up having to go into to get past people all the time because they create those walls constantly. And they're not wanting to interact with merging traffic because they're lazy.
EDIT: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
"any vehicle proceeding upon a highway at a speed less than the normal speed of traffic moving in the same direction at such time shall be driven in the right-hand lane"
"Impeding the flow of traffic in the left lane is punishable by a fine of up to $200."
https://www.txdot.gov/driver/safety/highway-driving.html
along with:
"After you pass someone, move into the right lane once you've safely cleared the vehicle."
Executive summary of Texas driving law: you must stay as far to the right as you can, without crossing the marker to the shoulder; if you pass, you must do so on the left, without impeding the flow of (oncoming) traffic.
The more common (legal) use though is as a turning lane.
- Sometimes people need to get by (emergencies)
- You're a blown tire / unexpected road hazard away from swerving into the car next to you
If you're driving the same speed as the car next to you, feel free to tap your breaks, let them ahead a couple lengths, and then tuck in behind them. It's safer!
Then I decided to gather data. My daily commute was about 15 minutes, maybe 10 miles of mostly 2-lane highway, some turns I had a stop sign, some didn't, so a bit a variation and reasonable opportunities for my aggressive driving. I did an experiment for a few days where I would drive either as aggressively as I normally did, even kicking it up a notch for science, or just chilling out and taking it easy; and timing how long the drive took me with either style.
After a few trials, I found that the super-aggressive driving did save time over the relaxed style; but it was less than 30 seconds, an amount that could easily be lost or gained by chance at the one stoplight on my drive. And as a bonus, with the relaxed style, when I arrived at my destination, I was actually more relaxed, with my pulse around 70 instead of 90.
I've stuck to a more relaxed style ever since. There have been more than a few times where someone who was in a hurry passed me over a double yellow line and flips my the bird for having the nerve to drive the speed limit and zooms off, and then a mile or two down the road I pull up right behind the exact same driver at a stoplight or other non-passable thing, and I feel that I've made the right choice.
This is what we in the business call confirmation bias. As many times as that's happened - I'm sure there are many times where they also didn't get stuck at the traffic light. Yet - you never saw them. Thus you never thought about. Thus... we call it confirmation bias. Interesting.
Problem is that they only did it for a few days. That’s not enough time for the margin of error to be very good. We all know traffic varies a lot week by week and day by day. Variance in just timing of the damn street lights is enough to make 30 seconds easily. You hit the stop light at the wrong time where I live - you’re sitting for a minute or more and that’s a big sway on a 15 minute commute.
But in the end, the experiment was for me and me alone. If you'd like to run your own more rigorous experiment and show how much time you can save by weaving through traffic, go right ahead; I've found what works better for me.
Are these "walls" already traveling 5-10 MPH above the speed limit, by any chance?
Speed limits aren't really important to this particular discussion. In the US, at least, they're set mostly based on observed traffic (85th percentile, even, I believe), and not based on any real assessment of what's safe. And there are also political and funding issues at play (consider in the 1970s there was a 55mph federal max speed limit law that was intended to increase fuel efficiency in order to lower dependence on foreign oil).
I consider speed limits to be more suggestions; what matters most is that you keep up with traffic and stick to the lane that most closely matches your desired speed. If you're uncomfortable with the speed necessary to keep up with even the rightmost lane, you probably shouldn't be driving on that road anyway.
Flow of traffic is more important than speed. Now if you're going the speed limit in the right most lane (not well below the speed limit) then you'll not likely have an issue even if you are "impeding" traffic at that point. It's more about taking up the left/passing lanes.
Btw - these rules exist even for single lane roads. You will need to pull over for traffic behind you even if you're going the speed limit or above. Generally there is some advisories or rules about 3 cars being behind you.
Here are some suggestions:
1. Move away
2. Move closer to your job
3. Rob a bank and then retire, since you're risking death every day anyway
Passing on the right is illegal most places for a reason: it's harder for the driver to your left to see you. The whole point of the convention of having faster traffic to the left and slower to the right is to increase predictability of behavior.
I agree with the parent you're replying to. Chill out and stop weaving in and out of traffic. Yes, it's annoying that people don't move to the right to yield to faster traffic, but ultimately you only save seconds or a small number of minutes. The risk -- assessment of which you seem to be not particularly good at -- isn't worth it. I'm not saying I follow my own advice 100% of the time, but I am under no illusion that I'm being safe when I don't.
Ah, yeah, that's why you see 10,000 people dying every second from changing lanes out on 101.
Get off the roads guys. You're really bad at assessing risk. If you think CHANGING LANES is going to KILL EVERYONE then you are in the same group as flat earthers as far as critical thinking goes. Stick with caltrain if this is how you guys truly feel. Your ideal mode of transport I'm sure. It's only got one track going each direction - can't even change lanes!
I don't like having to duke it out with dangerous idiots like yourself every day on the road, so I rent an apartment a mile from my office.
When driving your own car is outlawed in a couple of decades, I'm going to be pissed, but then I'm going to remember talking to psychopaths like you and just grudgingly accept it
The cloverleaf exits are very long meaning to get on the off ramp you have to merge into the right lane earlier than the signage suggests. It's easy to get trapped in the faster lanes by assholes that won't let you merge. There's many situations where you simply can't merge right early.
The 101 up the peninsula is a terrible freeway and its poor design and signage causes problems for even courteous and attentive drivers. It was interesting to drive on during the early days of the pandemic when traffic was significantly reduced. It became painfully apparent the design of the 101's exits were made for those super low traffic levels and woefully inadequate with today's levels.
https://theconversation.com/increasing-the-speed-limit-wont-...
https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/413955/
https://3659de2n61p72dta253nvqzd-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...
https://3659de2n61p72dta253nvqzd-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...
No, you do not need to pass slower traffic. Turn your radar cruise control on, enjoy your tunes, and learn to delay gratification.
So what people are doing is switching lanes without fear of penalty in the stretches between the monitoring gantries, and either causing inconvenience or outright danger to others driving responsibly.
Hopefully this will be fixed.
I actually think this is fine, but the signage is _awful_. In a bit of inverse awfulness, look at the 10 in the SGV. They converted a bus lane to an HOV decades (and now Fastrak). It's almost worthless unless your goal is to get from El Monte to downtown. There are virtually no exits/entrances. Also, I resent the effort spent on it because none of its glaring problems have ever been dealt with and my understanding is that it was basically converted to a toll road to comply with some federal requirement to lower travel times. So, the local agencies were able to claim they saved 2 minutes on the commute to downtown and got to keep the federal funding. Way to target the metric there.
The difference between how NorCal and SoCal does it is really bizarre. NorCal also has a lot of timed carpool lanes which are slowly being converted to these inane Lexus lanes. The timed carpool lanes felt like they were never a good idea because it seemed to generally cause confusion and instead increased congestion as people weren't sure whether they could use them. Also, I remain infuriated that the on-ramps in NorCal have carpool lanes enforced 24/7 instead of like they are in SoCal--only when the meter is actually on.
Welcome to Silicon Valley! You'll fit right in!
I'm uncertain if it is the demographic that buys a prius, or the techno display that rewards frugal driving.
I'll cut vehicles in poor states of repair or laden commercial vehicles some slack when it comes to things like merges and hill climbs.
AFAIK the project expenditure is covered by people who want to get there faster. In this case the city/Metro gets to deploy more public transit without having to pay for it, and without having to charge riders more money. There are plans for expansion of the system as it's been very popular.
For example, in Europe, it's quite normal for lawmakers to cycle or take public transport to the office. Obviously, some/most of it is performative to present a public image of the politician as a "man of the people", but it does expose them to the problems of the lay person as opposed to sitting in a chauffeured car.
Needless to say, our public transport systems (and cycling) are much more sane, affordable, and efficient options here. They are by no means perfect, but they are a damn good way to get around in most cities.
It doesn't mean you can't or don't drive, but often driving is massively slower or less convenient (especially inside the urban core), so you jump on the metro/train/tram or bicycle to get where you need to be.
This route along the 101 does actually have decent public transit by american standards - Caltrain is pretty awesome
That's not saying much; our standards are incredibly low.
> Caltrain is pretty awesome
Caltrain is awesome if you are one of the rare few who live within walking distance of a station and your destination is within walking distance of a station, or if only one of those two things is true, but your local Caltrain station has a parking lot that you can afford, or there's actually good bus service to get you the last mile.
Unfortunately, those conditions are not true for many, many people.
On top of that, Caltrain is ridiculously slow, and doesn't run anywhere near frequently enough, even during rush hour.
Tolls from the express toll lanes or on state routes like 520 and 167 don't pay for the transit system in Puget Sound. The long and short of why is that because funding indirectly comes from the motor vehicle fuel tax account, at least as backing for the bonds, the state constitution prohibits spending the money on anything but roads.
The closest you can get is that part of the ETL projects on I-405/SR 522 will build a full ETL pathway that bus rapid transit can use as part of Sound Transit's STRIDE network from Renton to Bothell, but that's only for transit insofar as public transit vehicle operators don't have to pay tolls.
(Washington State contributed, until the pandemic and assuming Move Washington passes, $0.00 to Puget Sound transit agencies. The state legislature insists that transit is a local issue. The state kicked in some money to local agencies to help during the pandemic but the bulk of that money was supplied by the federal government as part of stimulus bills. If Move Washington passes, it will be the first time the state funds any transit operations west of the Cascades in over a decade.)
Transit is way more expensive than any cameras.
California's not quite that bad, but, it's close to that bad. The Downtown Extension for Caltrain is $3 billion for a mile. SF's Central Subway is $923 million a mile. So sure, you can get about 114 feet of subway, but it'll be the short little LRVs and not like BART or anything nice-ish.
But it's mostly the fact that the leadership doesn't care, doesn't have to care, and is actively incentivized not to care.
I recently ordered a new one, and it appears to be free, assuming you send back the previous transponder.
Are they still working? They have an internal battery that can't be replaced. Mine stopped working after 4 years.
I hate the toll lanes with a passion. You get charged even when there is 0 traffic. It should be free unless there’s traffic! (Or just not have a toll lane to begin with and stop punishing the poor over and over!)
That's a feature, not a bug.
Of course, this is too much information to try to explain on a road sign, as drivers zoom past at 65+ MPH, and they're fumbling for their transponder in the glove box. That's why it would have been great if they had sent out emails to customers, whom they regularly send account-related updates.
Note that the different FastTrak operators in California have DRASTICALLY different fee structures. Some have monthly fees, some don't. Some charge for switchable transponders, some give them for free, some require a deposit, some only need your license plate # to charge you, etc.
At least its not like Orange County where they have WHOLE FREEWAYS that are fastrack ONLY. All day, everyday, with no free lanes in sight.
I suspect almost everyone could get out of it by claiming to forget what setting they had it on, or that they'd flipped it but the switch didn't go all the way over, or it was sticky, etc.
When he returned to my vehicle he looked at me closely and politely asked me (a non-trans male) if I was aware my driver's license specified that I was a woman. You could tell he was trying to walk the line between possibly offending me and alerting me to a fairly important clerical error.
I had no idea. The DMV screwed that one up somehow when I moved to that state and they granted my new license. We both had a pretty good laugh... I said, well, does that mean I can flirt my way out of this ticket? Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the answer was an amused "sorry, no."
Have you ever heard of a system like this that systematically measures window tints and then tickets every single offender? No, of course you haven't.
Even better would to have one of these signs up before the enforced toll area begins, to remind drivers what they have their transponder set to, in case they "forgot" to set it properly.
Still better would be for the transponder to beep once for the 1-person setting, twice for the 2-person setting, etc., although this could get a bit annoying.
Now everyone can pay to play and probably only buses will ever be able to use it (plus all the cheaters! - cheaters are everywhere). Note that one of the "selling points" of the express lanes was that during peak congestion, the HOV lane becomes "Bus Only" to give preference to the most effecient mode of transport (8+ passenger busses/vans iirc)
2) If you have a Clean Air Vehicle, you need to order a special CAV toll tag to avoid paying full fees. Some freeways are still free, others will give you a discount. This link has the full details
https://www.bayareafastrak.org/en/support/clean-air-vehicle....
A friend of mine would use the carpool lanes on the 520 bridge in Seattle, where there's a pretty strictly enforced 3+ carpool lane (so that the bus can jump the traffic), she would routinely get pulled over for not having enough people in her car.
Once the cop looks back at the driver though, they realize there's two babies in car seats in the back. Happened to her all the time.
Instead of punishing individuals who already suffer by being stuck using ineffective systems that can't handle the load, a far better solution would be updating those systems or replacing them with something that can adequately handle the traffic at its peak.
Better to update existing roads, improve alternate routes, and if needed build new roads to attract people away from over-crowded ones (peak times or not). Give people better alternatives and I promise they'll take them. We're now routinely using satellites to try to find ways to avoid traffic congestion. We all want it so badly we're resorting to space computers for help! This clearly isn't something you have beat people with a stick to do and it does no good to punish the people who don't have better alternatives available. We really can just put away the stick.
Congestion pricing is a quick fix that is not a punishment, because everyone would be waiting in traffic anyways. Opening up the extra lanes to all would only increase wait times for all with induced demand.
But like GP said, the fix especially angers people.
It doesn't actually fix the problem. The problem is that people can't get to where they want to go without difficulty because of inadequate planning/maintenance. Congestion pricing just changes the nature of that difficulty. People will still be negatively impacted, either by additional delays caused by having to select longer routes to where they're headed (when that's even an option) or by suffering financial penalties for something that is no fault of their own.
Fixing the problem means actually updating and maintaining roadways to accommodate demand (something that should already be the norm/expectation for every road built) and doing a better job planning for increased demand in the future so that the government isn't caught off guard and can budget accordingly to handle those costs and needs quickly.
Yes, actually fixing the problem once they've screwed up costs a lot of money, and it's true that congestion pricing could help pay for that (assuming that 100% of all money collected goes to that effort and nothing else), but in the meantime drivers continue to be negatively impacted, traffic forced to alternate longer routes will waste gas, hurt the environment, cause more wear on people's vesicles, cause increased wear and congestion on those alternate roads, and the administration/overhead of congestion pricing eats into every penny you earn towards something that should have been budgeted for and paid for by our taxes in the first place.
If the question is "How best to pay for what we should have been doing already" it's so much faster, and easier to get the funds needed to properly manage/maintain public roads by collecting a very small amount of money from a very a large number of people on the promise that they will be able to drive on any public road anywhere without needless difficulty, than it is to only collect funds from a very small number of people over a much much longer period of time while also inconveniencing every driver and pushing problems onto surrounding areas.
In a case like that the real solution would be improvements to alternate routes or the construction of new and efficient routes in areas where construction can take place to attract people away from the congested road that can't be improved on. The priority should always be to try to make things easier for people to move where they want to go, not to make it more inconvenient and painful for them when they do it.
I think most people would rather not deal with excessive traffic and crowded roads and wouldn't if given the choice. Many just don't really get much choice in the commuting patterns they have. If your job requires you to be somewhere at a specific time, you're going to go. If you have to pick up your kid at a specific place and time you'll be there. Most of us are already trying to optimize for less traffic and travel time. Those of us with limited options to do that suffer enough as it is.
I guess I was thinking even longer term. Maybe people will demand/gravitate towards areas that are not so car dependent. It does seem sub-optimal that we made a world for ourselves that expects pretty much each and every adult to own something as expensive and dangerous as a car just to get by.
I don't know that building more roads is the best long term answer.
I was skeptical that public transportation or walking/biking could ever be preferable to driving a car, but I've seen it working in other countries (as long as the trains are running, I prefer them to get around in Tokyo) and even here I've seen it work in very limited spaces (mostly campuses). It can work, but It's harder to make those options attractive in places that weren't designed for/around them. It's something new developments should absolutely consider.
We could also help ease congestion though other means too. Telecommuting, more flexible work schedules, and on-site child care could help a lot, but are hard to put into place since that falls on companies to offer them.
Also - does the CHP even have time to enforce this? At least where I live they are plenty busy with more pressing matters. But maybe on the Peninsula they have more time.
As someone who grewup in the Bay Area and now lives in Los Angeles I thought it was funny when she talked about how to tell the invaders (based on how they say either "101" or "the 101"). The better test for this (in my opinion) is if someone says they live / work in "the valley" or the peninsula. If someone says "the 101" that just means they are from socal vs somewhere else. It always cracks me up when someone tries to humblebrag by saying "oh me? I live in The Valley" because the OG locals are internally rolling their eyes.
I was greeted the following month with a *$320* ticket. The fees themselves totalled to no more than $12 which I would've been totally okay paying, but the overage fee for non-payment (which how was I supposed to know the owner wasn't watching the records for his vehicle - per Turo rules?) were over *$100 per charge*. To call this predatory is an understatement. Also, a word of warning to anyone using Turo, they usually indicate that "the driver is liable for all toll charges while driving the vehicle" which can screw you if you don't confirm in writing with the owner if they're watching toll records. Always settle via the Turo app, many owners will try to settle with you directly and try to force you to pay the full fee. Fortunately, I was able to get slightly less ripped off and pay 40% of the charge by settling through the Turo app.
I love CA and a lot of my friends live there, but goodness are they chalking up reasons for me to never live there again.
Back in the day Turo was mostly people with somewhat interesting cars who wanted to share them, and rental agencies had nothing interesting, and the pricing was reasonable.
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Now a $60 a day car can come out to more than a $100 a day car because of extended insurance for specific models, Turo fees, weird discount structures, massive deposits (One $70 a day car had an $700 deposit).
And there's no way to actually account for that in searching, the estimated price never includes any of this. So you're left to randomly click around and "guess" which cars don't all belong to the same guy tacking on a massive deposit, or asking for some money on the side.
It all just feels incredibly sleazy, and wreaks of Turo's model essentially failing since private owners care more about their cars than an agency, and they likely had to deal with a ton more claims.
There are also a ton of deeply unsafe cars on there now, especially older non-enthusiast cars. Rental agencies might not be the best about safety, but they also won't keep a 100k mile structurally rusted out econobox laying around...
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I just went through that last week and decided to go with Sixt. I got a rental "A5 or similar" (convertible 4 series was the option I took at the counter), and for 12 dollars a day I get unlimited tolls in CA.
What I've noticed on Turo is now there's a large mix of 'big' players: Unregulated car rental biz that have 10+ beaters of Echos/Sparks/Minis/Focus, or, a buy-here/pay-here used car dealership that's renting out everything on the lot.
[1] https://support.turo.com/hc/en-us/articles/203991940-Vehicle...
100k miles doesn't make it unsafe, the rust does. 100k miles is mentioned because a 50k mile car is less likely to have potential critical rust, and rental companies are selling cars at 50k miles on average.
Of course now this is the part where you say 50k mile cars can have rust too! They sure can, but where is rust worse, at 50k miles or after an additional 50k miles?
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It's not just rust either, as miles tick up there's plenty of maintenance that's supposed to be done that private renters making a buck won't.
Your rental agency isn't going to pick up a high milage 3 series that's one good highway trip away from shredding its serpentine belt because no one ever fixed a single oil leak it had...
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They're also not going to do what my Turo renter did in Miami:
Give you a car with a brake light and clear metal on metal sounds and tell you "oh, that's ok, the sensor is just broken"
>Now a $60 a day car can come out to more than a $100 a day car because of extended insurance for specific models, Turo fees, weird discount structures, massive deposits
This honestly feels like the story of every gig economy service out there (Airbnb, Turo, etc). They were unique and interesting and well worth the cost versus traditional competitors at one point. Now they're at the point where I'm back to cross-shopping the traditional options (hotels / car agencies / etc) first.
It seemed like most of the rentals there were people running their own rental companies (fleets of 4 or 5 cars). It worked really well for us.
California doesn't set Turo's toll policies, and many states have implemented automated tolling, so your list of states to live in in going to get smaller and smaller.
I think the biggest problem with automated tolling is that every state has their own independent system -- the federal government should enforce one standard, so I can use my toll reader on any toll road in the country.
Oh hey, I was looking to see if there was a multi-state toll tag and it sounds like the US government did pass a law requiring interoperability, but this linked website doesn't appear to sell this "nationalpass", so I don't know what happened to the law:
Toll Interoperability by 2016
H.R.4348 - MAP-21
In 2012, Congress passed the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) to ease the burden of tolled interstate travel by providing motorists the convenience of a single toll tag and account.
My EZ-Pass works in 19 states.
The actual effective way is to provide alternative transportation options.
If the roads are free to use and not congested, many people will use them until the cost or inconvenience of using the road is greater than the alternative transportation. (that's not true of everyone, of course, some will use alternative transportation even at greater cost or inconvenience)
The metro areas should be responsible for handling intra-metro traffic, and that traffic should stay away from interstates.
Which they of course are not.
Actually, no, the nation did not pay for those. The NJ, PA, OH, IN, and IL toll roads you're talking about were built with state-issued bonds, not Interstate money, because they're older than the Interstate laws. They got Interstate numbers later, purely as a matter of convenience for travelers trying to get from A to B. The only federally-funded Interstate that I know of that is allowed to charge tolls is the WV Turnpike, and that only because it was so horrifically expensive to build and yet was so valuable to the nation as an artery.
The Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike is another such road (I-95 now), but tolls were removed when I-295 bypassing the area was built. There are other state-built toll roads in greater Richmond that continue to be tolled. The Virginia Beach Expressway was tolled until its initial bonds were paid off. On both roads, you can still fairly easily see where the booths were.
This of course is the shape of much corruption in the US - the government mandates some thing but with no restrictions on its abuse, and then private companies leverage that mandate to screw you (see also: DL/SSN numbers). What needs to happen is any such mandates need to be designed as complete systems that regulate all constructive behavior, rather than mere partial solutions that complexity gets built on top of.
Well, that's not quite true. There are a couple of major consortia of electronic toll systems in the US. The largest consortium is the E-ZPass system, which started out with a cooperation in the NYC area and grew to encompass basically everything from Illinois to Virginia to Maine by the time MAP-21 passed. Since it was the largest, in terms of number of systems implemented, their position was more or less that everyone would implement compatibility with E-ZPass. North Carolina, Minnesota, Florida (and I believe Kentucky) added compatibility to E-ZPass post-2012.
The other three consortia are California (interoperable with no one else, because California I guess), the Texas/Oklahoma/Kansas group, and the Georgia/North Carolina/Florida interoperability region (which will be fully subsumed by E-ZPass once Georgia's system becomes interoperable, apparently later this year). There's still a couple of systems that interoperate with nobody else as well.
In SoCal as long as you have a fastrack account associated with the vehicle/license plate even if you have no transponder your account still gets charged the normal fee + a small additional courtesy fee. I believe the additional fee might be 6$ which does not seem ridiculous (to me at least).
To me this more just sounds like the owner of that vehicle is an idiot and never registered the plate with fastrack.
Embarcadero Road (and Oregon Expressway) is the very next exit. The San Antonio entrance puts you directly onto the exit-only lane for Embarcadero/Oregon. This lane is 1.2 miles from entrance to exit, and it's rarely backed up even if the rest of the freeway is, as there is no stoplight after you get off the freeway.
So most rational drivers making that short trip just stay in the exit-only lane.
But now the sign tells me I can use the express lane for $1.30! What a deal. In the space of 1.2 miles, I can cut across four lanes of traffic to get to the express lane, and then cut back across four lanes again to barely make the exit.
This will make me a popular driver, won't it?
That's what made it so funny: it listed the one toll trip you would never take from there.
I think I recall that "Embarcadero" was in the display and not painted on, so they could fix it to give a more practical destination.
I have two "old-style" transponders with a 1/2/3+ switch, and one "new-style" passive RFID tag/sticker that has no switch, so I have no idea how they are determining what to charge me. Perhaps they are using AI/camera hardware to count the occupants now.
In general, there is little upside to being an early adopter of systems your creditors seem excited about — for examples, see: smart meters, EzPass lanes, facial recognition for taxpayer identity verification, etc. I prefer to stick with existing systems as long as possible...
https://sdrostra.com/1-5-million-private-ca-cars-have-ticket....
Those transponders are cool though. I have a different one for my electric car with a CAV sticker which lets me use some of the SoCal lanes alone.
This is no different from any toll road except the toll road and the free road are right next to each other and are therefore perfect substitutes with the only difference being the amount of traffic on each.
Plenty of places in the US have whole highways that require payment to use. Same for most tunnels and bridges that you can go around but it takes significantly longer.
That's how they make up the difference. That, and property taxes.
Where is it different?
The privatization of the expressways was pretty much enabled by the viability of the rail networks, which are also mostly privatized, mostly profitable, and extremely well-built.
Unless maybe I failed to make clear that the standard deductible's job is to represent car+gas+etc costs.
They are really competing with trains. Even if they were free.
They don't ask which brand of car you're driving, but there's a really high correlation between income level and living area - northern parts being the richest.
I would have said "it" was paying more to use the fast lane, and hiring a driver is definitely paying more.
They wanted to ensure that the HOV lanes move fast enough that the people who are carpooling will actually be rewarded for doing so. This meant that there had to be a dynamic toll for solo drivers.
Imagine the outrage when on a particularly busy day, this dynamic toll exceeded $20 for a ten-mile journey. The reality is plenty of people were cheating and using the HOV lanes as solo drivers, and now the tolling mechanism means they can no longer get away with it.
In the sense that -- suppose that you have a 4 lane highway. Adding a 5th lane will actually not help much to increase the capacity of the highway if it is traffic-bottlenecked. For certain traffic volumes and lane configurations, adding lanes doesn't increase throughput.
So having a toll lane basically just helps to generate revenue from people who are willing to pay (and allow those who are willing to pay to drive slightly faster past traffic), while not significantly slowing down most other people (who already experienced congestion in certain stretches of highway before this).
Now, whether this feels fair and is a good idea is a different question (and clearly generates a lot of opinions).
So, yes, everyone's sitting around waiting, but it's the difference between sitting at home in your living room and sitting in the DMV.
They manage to give you instant feedback if you have paid your bill, so I don’t see why this could not work the same.
As much as the DC metro area is a hellscape their auction style access to HOV lanes is probably the most straightforward.
It’s nice in that you know how fucked you are based on the price. I remember passing through once and one section had like a $38 toll, I just got off the highway and grabbed a burger.
- They took my CC number and just kept replenishing $25 every so often even though it had a big balance already. Thankfully my card expired so now I'm sloooowly (don't drive much anymore) working my way through the $100+ credit on my account.
- It is so hard to check and contest charges. I had to sent in my complaint with snail mail and IIRC it took a month before I got a reply back that requested information that I already wrote in the first letter doesn't apply. I gave up at this point.
- There is _NO_ way to check the transponder short of just using it and waiting a week for the event to show up on the bill. My windshield was apparently blocking radio transmissions (I know why, don't tell me) and experimenting with a different location has a crazy long cycle time due to the above. There days I guess I could do it with a car driving behind me reading what the sign say, but that only works when there isn't much traffic.
I hate Fastrak.
https://www.bayareafastrak.org/en/support/toll-tag-basics-fa...
- They too have a stupidly weird replenishment algorithm where it takes what feels like weeks to adjust. Then out of nowhere, it will increase many times even if you only increased travel temporarily. It went from maintaining a $26 balance to $180 which will take forever to use.
- "It is so hard to check and contest charges." - We used to have a business with two delivery vans with E-ZPass. We received a very high bill and it was full of "toll violation" charges which were 2 or 3 dollars that accompanied nearly every toll, some with two violations. I called them to inquire what these violation were and they flat out told me "we dont know." I forget the details but we wound up having to pay though the charges never appeared again. I feel like they robbed us using a computer glitch.
- "There is _NO_ way to check the transponder" - Yup. This is really frustrating because Ive gone on trips where the vehicle was supposedly on the account but the tag wasn't registering at the NJ tolls on I95 during a road trip. So I got a bunch of unpaid toll violations I had to manually resolve through their awful web portal. I then check the account and find the vehicle was not on the account - huh? I am sure I added it. Who knows...
I hate E-ZPass.
In Washington State who has the "Good to Go" system. Its deployment has been full of quirks, my favorite of which was that if your balance ever went negative (say you had it set up to replenish at $5 but got a $10 toll) the system would refuse to charge you (even when you had a payment method on file or went to their website) and you had to call in and talk to a human to fix it.
TReO, the tolling system for the Port Mann bridge in BC before it was detolled, was built by a Vancouver-based company: https://oxd.com/work/treo-tolling-website/
And run by the TIC: https://www.ticorp.ca/
Second, every tolling system is different. Sometimes the accounting (often called the back office system) is contracted out, sometimes it is performed in-house by the tolling agency.
Source: I work for one of the better quality contractors.
Between:
* The implementation delays https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/jul/19/wsdot-reaches-...
* The payment issues https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sta...
* The customer support issues
* the sensor issues (admittedly those may be on the state and not ETC/ETAN, unclear)
and more the state abandoned its contract with ETC in favor of one with ETAN, which took the system offline for two weeks to switch over and admittedly hasn't been much better (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/wsd...).
God forbid we let the state hire a few local SWEs (Seattle doesn't have any of those) to write and maintain a system instead of paying $30M every few years plus a cut of tolls to whatever Texas contractor gave the most perks to a WSDOT exec.
There's a good reason that the systems themselves cost so much money. Heck, it costs an arm and a leg just for the routine maintenance permits! The CI/CD, security, data persistence, data provenance, latency, and agency interop requirements are absolutely insane. Trust me, it's more than just a few SWE can handle.
Lastly, it's definitely not about any under-the-table dealings. There's just a huge amount of work! When deciding to whom to award the contract, they do background checks on key company people, look at past contracts, etc.
That's the reality of the situation.
They introduced "Pay as You Go" (direct tolling) so you don't need to hold a balance anymore. You'll basically just have a negative balance until they charge your card twice a month. Has surprisingly actually worked for me, and confirms that accounts can go negative now. I can choose to add funds or just wait for the charge to go through.
I had a motorcycle EZpass die after four years and I didn't know about it for nearly a year because many of the NJ barriers don't give feedback on the status. Looking back through the records I could see that I rarely got billed from a license plate read so I optimized my lane positioning.
The other toll-only highway, the Northwest Parkway, has its own pass system (GO PASS), but ExpressToll is compatible with it as well.
I have the sticker for my car; it's always seemed to work OK for me.
I also hate fastrack and the “fast lanes”. Only good thing is they send you the transponder pretty much for free :)
> California currently only uses I, O, and Q in between two other letters, for example "1AQA000".[citation needed]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_license_plate_de...
I used their terrible web portal to remove the other car from my account. They just added it back.
I called them and told them it wasn't my car, that I did not consent to the charges. They didn't care.
I ended up just cancelling Fastrak entirely and now I pay tolls only for my own vehicle manually. I can't use carpool lanes because of this.
I've been considering registering a Fastrak with someone else's address, just so I can use carpool lanes again.
FasTrak is a monopoly operated by a private, for-profit firm, accountable to it's owners. As long as complaints don't get to the body that oversees them and which is politically accountable to the public, they aren't going to try to do better, because that has a cost and reduces profits.
Use the address of someone in management at Fastrak if you want the problem fixed.
But using someone elses address is a huge security problem
I love the ability to add cars by license plate to an account, and being able to specify exactly when coverage starts and ends down to minute precision. Renting a car? You can add the plate to your account for just the period you're renting so you don't pay the rental company fees.
These kinda solutions just feel like band-aids on top of band-aids when what is really needed are sutures(stitches) ?
I'm curious though, are there startups trying to solve this problem of public transport ? Just like the many startups focused on trying to perfect self-driving cars.
PS self-driving cars cannot solve traffic congestion