Comment by 71a54xd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 71a54xd | Hacker News Reader

I recently rented a vehicle on Turo in CA for three days and racked up maybe three toll charges - even though I followed the law and did my best to avoid HOV lanes when I didn't have enough occupants.

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.

but goodness are they chalking up reasons for me to never live in there again

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:

https://www.nationalpass.net/

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.

> 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.

My EZ-Pass works in 19 states.

And I have a transponder for the Seattle area that I use about 3-5 times a year. I don't live in Washington but I do visit regularly. It doesn't work anywhere else but when I need it, I need it. A nationwide standard really is needed.

I don't think interstate highways should be tolled, period. They were paid for decades ago, and maintenance should be covered by the existing gas tax. I am not opposed to convenience highways in metro areas being tolled, as long as there is a non-toll option that is reasonably similar in non-rush hour times. As it stands the major Chicago to New York and New York to DC routes are tolls almost the entire way. The nation paid for those routes, and now pays to use them as well.

It should definitely be tolled, but for a different reason. The only effective way to control congestion is to put a price on it, so the tolls should kick in iff there is heavy traffic.

> The only effective way to control congestion is to put a price on it

The actual effective way is to provide alternative transportation options.

Right, I think most people on HN get that. This was a thread about highway tolls.

I'm not sure that's true, just providing alternative transportation doesn't by itself control congestion-- London has good alternative transportation options, but also has a £15 congestion charge (i.e. toll) to limit traffic during peak hours.

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 other option is reduce the entrances/exits in metro areas so that most traffic on metro interstates is no longer traffic that is going from one area of the metro to another area.

The metro areas should be responsible for handling intra-metro traffic, and that traffic should stay away from interstates.

This seems like a reasonable argument, but in this case we're talking about 101, which is not an interstate highway.

It's a federal highway that predates the interstate system. It was still built using federal funds, so the argument stands.

Only if you assume that once built, highways are thereafter free.

Which they of course are not.

> As it stands the major Chicago to New York and New York to DC routes are tolls almost the entire way. The nation paid for those routes, and now pays to use them as well.

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.

The biggest problem with automated tolling is there is no law restricting how rental companies can use those tolls against you. I don't know the current state of things, but there used to be this thing where rental companies would charge you say a $30 convenience fee simply for passing on a $3 toll charge. The consent-fiction was to bring your own toll transponder and cross your fingers it worked or avoid toll roads or whatever.

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.

Ah yes, MAP-21. It passed a requirement that all electronic toll systems become interoperable by 2016, but without any penalty for failure or money inducements to succeed, so nothing happened.

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.

I don't use Turo anymore, no point at all.

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.

100k miles is ‘deeply unsafe’? You can’t evaluate structural rust in a photo, so if you’re deciding safety based on mileage you have a very unreal sense of safe vs unsafe.

I've never had an unsafe car persay, but when working with a small budget you'll end up with a high-mileage 2010 Toyota Corolla. (Turo says "Cars that have more than 130,000 mi/200,000 km may remain listed as long as they’re in excellent condition") [1]

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...

That's not what I wrote, but you're certainly free to misread my sentence and go off on a strawman.

https://youtu.be/hQlrGGJodgQ

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"

It says "100k mile structurally rusted out" is deeply unsafe. Did we read the same comment?

>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.

>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.

I used Turo for the first time on a trip to Salt Lake City recently to go skiing. I wanted something with 4WD in case it snowed. Turo was hundreds of dollars cheaper than any of the airport rentals.

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.

Also great for Colorado ski trips when the Traction Law is in effect. Normal rental agencies will never guarantee a compliant reservation (unless you spend triple to rent a vehicle class you can reasonably expect to comply) but the filters on Turo make it simple. The insurance situation is a little dicey though; apparently only a handful of insurance policies (thru insurance agencies and credit card benefits) cover P2P rentals, maybe like 25% of them or so.

Is that just Turo screwing you over?

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.

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