Toll roads are spreading in America | Hacker News Reader

Toll roads are spreading in America

economist.com

208 pointssmurda690 comments

Two things I like are:

* HOT lanes in the Bay Area: they allocate demand efficiently and subsidize multi-people transport. I wish there were more.

* Toll roads in Texas: you can take the slip roads almost everywhere but they’re slow. The highways were fast but you had to pay.

Overall, I think fare at point of use is a great structure. In the past we couldn’t enforce it but now we can do this for more things.

The only problem is that we’ve decided that impounding cars that don’t have license plates or which have license plate covers is unacceptable because the poor do this most frequently. I hope we will clean up enforcement and then we will have the right incentives here.

I don’t have an issue with HOT lanes, but I’m not a big fan of the toll roads in Texas.

I don’t like that it creates separate classes of infrastructure for citizens based on their ability to pay. Even the non-toll highways had an HOT-like lane you paid per-use to drive on that was often significantly faster than the free lanes.

It makes a system where I suspect many people won’t want to pay to upgrade the free infrastructure because they don’t use it, and people who can’t afford the daily tolls waste even more time in traffic. The fast pass lane are even worse because they cannibalize lanes that could be used to alleviate general traffic (and were typically sparsely used).

The tolls were substantial for some people. $3-$8 a day on toll roads (ie no fast pass lane). At $8 a day, that’d be $40 a week, ~$160/month. That’s nearly 20% of the weekly pre-tax income of someone making Austin’s $22/hr minimum wage.

> I don’t like that it creates separate classes of infrastructure for citizens based on their ability to pay. Even the non-toll highways had an HOT-like lane you paid per-use to drive on that was often significantly faster than the free lanes.

But ... government income is largely dependent on the rich, and government spending largely benefits the poor. This is what is always forgotten about it. The reason debt is such a thorny issue is that debt really benefited the poor. And over time, so will these toll roads.

The reason toll roads benefit the poor is that the rich don't travel anyways, and this gives extra economic options to the poor. A large portion will figure out how to use this extra economic option (because that was thoroughly checked before the bridge was even built, and it wouldn't have been built if the answer wasn't that they would)

So both the building of the bridge, and the use of it almost exclusively benefit the poor.

The rich may travel on the toll roads, but they certainly benefit from those who do.

If you want to disincentivize usage of certain things, money is generally the most effective option. Yes, some rich folks won't be bothered, but even fairly low amounts make most people think twice. Too many cars are a problem in many parts of the world, for a number of reasons (noise, smog, traffic jams, or parking space in cities), so nudging people towards alternative usage patterns is worthwhile in my opinion.

Alternatives are the most effective option. Tolls just make laws the rich don't have to obey and conditions they don't have to experience. Aggregate suffering isn't lowered, just shifted to the poor.

If you want cars off the road, you tax rich people and build trains and bike lanes, and shut down cynical RTO. Full stop.

It’s not that simple. For trains to be a complete solution you need walkable cities, and high density transport-oriented residential construction near stations.

This is almost diametrically opposite to parking-oriented cities and sprawling suburbia.

The best time for a city to invest in making their city walkable and public-transportation-able is decades ago. The second best time for a city to invest in making their city walkable and public-transportation-able is now.

Not everyone wants walkable. I'd much rather a remote first economy and cars. One of my hobbies is riding motorcycles on race tracks, I need a garage to store them, and a vehicle to tow them there. This is practically impossible in "walkable" cities.

I suppose Honda doesn't make bikes for domestic purchasers.

I dont understand your comment.

90% of Japanese residents live in, essentially, a walkable megacity, and plenty of them ride motorcycles on the country's many tracks (which you would expect, since Japan houses several of the top motorcycle manufacturers). They don't have any issues participating in their hobby, and you wouldn't either.

Note that this holds without even having to mention that holding the ability for millions of people to be independent and mobile without needing to purchase and maintain a vehicle against a niche and expensive hobby is ridiculous. But there's no need to bring that up because we can have both.

Suburbs are often plenty dense for great transit if you give great. Howeveriwhen transit is as bad as most get it is no wonder nobody uses it

> If you want cars off the road, you tax rich people and build trains and bike lanes, and shut down cynical RTO. Full stop.

The first two smell like communism, the last massively harms the rich people and their playthings (REITs - real estate investment trusts). Won't happen, not in countries where Big Money is pulling the strings (i.e. the US, Germany and UK).

If levying taxes and using those tax receipts to build infrastructure is enough to smell like communism to you, I have unfortunate news to tell you about how every single government on the planet operates

Should have added a /s. My point was that this is precisely what way too many people think, and this is why good things either do not happen at all or get massively impeded until they are finally done.

My apologies for not picking up on the sardonic tone, and I appreciate that you don't rely on the crutch of /s to make up for others lack of reading comprehension.

But UK and Germany are already heavily invested in taxing rich people, trains and bike lanes?

I know many people who would always prefer their cars over trains or bikes, simply because that's what they know, and they would not leave their comfort zone unless there's something nudging/pushing them.

my wife and I lived a block walk from a metro stop. my wife’s work was on the same metro line, also one block walk. 20 minute metro ride, at least 45 minute drive plus parking. my wife has not taken a metro once in 4.5 years.

Weird how you can have different prices for different seats at the ball game, or different fare classes on the airplane, or member access lines at museum, or valet parking, or different restaurants, or different clothing stores... But introduce price segmentation on highways and people just can't believe it.

Planes, sports, restaurants, stores, etc are all privately-owned or publicly-traded businesses. In the social contract, it's expected that businesses offer services depending on what you're willing to pay.

Driving and public transport is not a business, it is a civil service.

Should we begin to offer tiered plans for EMS as well?

My sports stadium was built with my taxpayer dollars. I can't even watch the team on tv though.

We do sort of have tiered EMS with insurance and ambulance costs. When my buddy came to the US from India, he was told, "unless you're blessing out, call an Uber to the ER."

Do you have an issue with paying for electricity or water by use? Or to ride public transit that you pay for a ticket?

It seems like a good property that someone who uses something the most pays the most.

If something has positive externalities such as vaccines or education then I’m fine subsidizing or making it free, but traffic has negative externalities.

Highways are almost always publicly owned monopolies. We, the public, choose to build them because they enrich all of us.

If you want to raise the money to buy land and build a private highway, price segment away. If you want to price segment a publicly owned and operate commons, it needs to be in the public interest.

People are clearly arguing that price segmentation on roads is in the public interest. Which it clearly is.

It's anything but clear although I think a self-appointed group assures us they know what's best despite tolls being wildly unpopular when real people are asked.

No pretty much all real-world evidence points to them being positive [0]. Feel free to share evidence otherwise, if you have any.

You can argue about popularity if you want, the topic is actually about whether they're "in the public interest" though. Those are distinct things, and "I don't like them because they're unpopular" is pretty hilariously circular logic -- not the type of thinking I'd want my name attached to, that's for sure!

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges...

FTA:

>The problem is that the model no longer works. Over the decades, the cost of maintaining roads and highways has risen, even as cars have become more fuel-efficient. And raising gas taxes, even just in line with inflation, is generally considered to be political suicide. The last time Congress did it was in 1993. The result is a giant deficit. In fiscal 2024, the federal government spent $27bn more on maintaining roads than it collected in tax. At the state and local levels, fuel taxes covered barely a quarter of road spending.

So apparently that's how the owner intends to raise the money and build. Beyond that, "who should pay for government spending" is of course the perennial discussion, and exactly what we are debating right now.

Which of those are public infrastructure? (Notwithstanding that many times now there is private investment, which I don't believe should be the case.)

Well in my state you can add electricity and natural gas to the list. National parks also have additional fees (and privately-owned, price-segmented lodgings and restaurants) despite being a commons already subsidized by taxes.

Anyway, the point is not about the precedent but whether it is sensible. And that's not to imply that I love the country being sold off to billionaires and corporations right now. For medical care I go the other direction - we need the government funded base offering.

> electricity and natural gas

Certainly, but in many states, at least on the west coast (not to imply anything about elsewhere, just no experience or knowledge) they are privatized but rates and metering are still regulated.

> Anyway, the point is not about the precedent but whether it is sensible. And that's not to imply that I love the country being sold off to billionaires and corporations right now. For medical care I go the other direction - we need the government funded base offering.

And I 100% agree here. I have a fairly unique (or at least uncommon) set of experiences: was born in Scotland under the NHS, grew up in Australia under Medicare (the public health system), and have been in the US for 15+ years now, and worked for a good portion of that at least part time or full time in EMS and seen every day the consequences of lack of access to healthcare or access in a way that is focused on acute care versus solid proactive and routine care.

The government has had a flat cost model for so long that people would lose their minds if it ever changed. It's the only institution that is free for the poorest and ungodly expensive for the richest, while providing the same product to everyone.

Getting better government services logically follows from paying more for them, but the idea is so sacrilegious and alien that people would probably riot.

Because those other things are optional.

> Yes, some rich folks won't be bothered, but even fairly low amounts make most people think twice.

We saw this very clearly recently with the Manhattan congestion road tax. $9 paid no more than once per day to drive into Lower Manhattan is close to nothing by NYC standards, yet traffic still dropped substantially and stayed suppressed.

Additional to your point, one of the benefits of high user pays is to allow opt-in progressive taxation. (The rich who want to use it can, at their own cost, the rich who do not feel it's fair can sit in the traffic with everyone else and avoid the taxation)...

idea: Maximize the income of the toll lane and use the money to subsidize new free lanes or other forms of mass transit.

Couldn't disagree more. People should be able to pay more for use of better infrastructure. If $3-$8 a day isn't worth it for you, there's a free option that's totally acceptable.

See, here's the thing. Definition of acceptable isn't up to you. It's up to the people who have no other choice but to use it.

Theoretically those people express their opinion via electing representatives. Infrastructure investment and "fixing the potholes" seems to be a common campaign theme.

It really isn't followed through on as often as you think, and since Citizen's United, the typical candidate tends to chase the donations of people who think tolls are a grand idea. Not so much the rest of the working stiffs. Institutional inertia is a hell of a thing when your working demographic is keeping the retiree's and children's heads above water.

Maybe the solution is more going over to a fee based on % of one’s net worth. So since you seem to think something like $6 being an acceptable price for someone with a $500 net worth, maybe 1.2% of net worth for each traversal of a segment is appropriate, so you pay maybe $24,000 with every trip down the toll road and Elon musk pays $9.12 billion, while the bottom of the rung working class can pay $6.

I think the right solution is charge whatever would maximize revenue, then distribute the revenues evenly among all residents/voters/whomever.

I… wow, I actually really like this idea. As you may have seen in my other comments, I’m not blind to the advantages of toll money being used to improve roads etc. This preserves that upside, while making the publicly owned resource roughly equally available to everyone.

I am actually fine with letting people who do higher value labor get faster to their destination. We only do these foolish bending over backwards for equity things in the public sphere and ultimately we all pay as a society.

If you want to help poor people, tax and then redistribute. Don’t make a million small rules and discounts that make things less efficient and our society poorer.

> If $3-$8 a day isn't worth it for you, there's a free option that's totally acceptable.

That, in fact, isn't always true.

In Austin, for example, I-45 was supposed to have "frontage roads" all along it so that people could avoid the toll road if they chose at the expense of going through a few traffic lights.

Gee, guess what somehow magically never got built in many sections of I-45? So, your options are pay the toll or go a LONG way out of the way in order to avoid it since the construction of the tollway also destroyed the old routes.

The fastest highway in the United States is the 85 mph controlled access public-private venture toll road east of Austin. State income tax is not a thing in Texas, and that road would have otherwise not been completed at the price or schedule it was built on without the backing of the private company that built it.

I'm not sure what your point is, can you explain?

I think the point is that in this case, the choice is between the infrastructure being pay-to-use or just not existing, not between the infrastructure being free and being pay-to-use

That was my suspicion, but I'm not sure. Obviously, they have other valid options. Raise taxes. Have the state borrow, build, and operate the road as a toll road at cost, etc.

Sure. I think the point is that in Texas, those are valid but not viable due to politics.

Why would you tax people's income to pay for a highway? Fuel taxes and license fees would normally be the way to pay for transportation infrastructure.

It works well in many (most I know) countries: is fuel+license more common than general (income and fuel and other) taxation ('normally' would imply most do like you say?).

If you use income taxes, then people who drive less are subsidizing people who drive more. It's bad incentives.

But that does not make it 'normally'; where does it work that way vs income(and other) taxes? Where I live and all countries around, roads are paid from general taxes (including income, road and fuel taxes).

Because that doesn't get nearly close enough to the cost of roads. Interstates alone have, I believe, cost us over 25 trillion. Just interstates, not all highways.

That number seems very unlikely to be accurate. It's more than 2x larger than all local, state, and federal government spending in 2025 combined.

No that's the actual figure since the 60s when they were built. I'm cheating a little, that's not a per year number.

Well ice cars are going to be declining in market share so we will need to implement an electric car tax to offset the cost.

Houston would be unlivable without toll roads in 2025. The medical center would collapse overnight. The SH288 toll has probably indirectly saved more lives than any other toll project in the state. Medical professionals can reliably get between their suburban homes and their patients in ~constant time now.

It's maybe not "fair" that some people can use this option indiscriminately every day, but at least it is an option that everyone has access to. There's no physical barrier stopping you from using the Texas toll roads if you really needed to in an emergency. All that will happen is a bill will appear in your mailbox about 30 days later. If you choose to not pay it, the chances something bad will happen are approximately zero.

Of course, this project cost $2.1 billion, including $815 million to build the toll lanes in the freeway’s center.

And it could be made ineffective as regional expansion continues. As soon as enough people who are willing to pay the toll saturates capacity you end up with the same issue (“just one more lane bro”). I see this all the time in the DC metro area’s toll express lanes that often save no significant time.

Another effective way to control highway congestion is to get people off of highways and invest in your transit system, make it better than driving so that people don’t drive as often.

But maybe Houston is too far gone for that.

For comparison, the Chicago red line extension project adds 5 miles of heavy rail for about twice the cost, so 4x more per mile. But the Houston toll lane project doesn’t do anything positive for adjacent property values like new rail stations do. Chicago will get money back from more property taxes and the new stations will relieve traffic on the Dan Ryan.

Transit lines get faster as ridership increases due to the ability to increase schedule frequency, the exact opposite of highways.

I am not saying Houston should magically turn into 1800s-era urban fabric but maybe some decent park and ride commuter transit would be a start? There are cities in Texas with 6 figure populations that have NO public bus system.

> As soon as enough people who are willing to pay the toll saturates capacity you end up with the same issue (“just one more lane bro”).

Increase the toll prices to reduce congestion, increase the number of buses on that route, and use some of the money for either expanding the road or building another more-or-less parallel road.

> Increase the toll prices to reduce congestion

This stretch of road is already using congestion/dynamic pricing. I've never had to go slower than 85mph the entire way.

Sure, the point is, what about 10-20 years from now when there are enough drivers where the cost doesn’t matter?

It’s like Disney World. They can fill the parks with people willing to pay $200 a day for tickets alone. If you can’t afford it then it doesn’t matter that other people get to get in.

Highways just don’t scale well. Two train tracks can move about the same number of people as 15 lanes of highway.

This indeed the “just one more lane bro” solution. What you are missing is how utterly destructive to the urban fabric and disgusting freeways are. Take a stroll next to one sometime.

I live within earshot of one and there's a freight rail even closer. Sure it's loud but the way it causes "the wrong kind of people"[1] to self select to not live here is great for my stress levels.

[1]the kind who have so few problems that freeway proximity makes it high on the list of things that inform where they choose to live

Lol spare me. Actually you’re right, let me live in a nice urbanist city and you feel free to live on a freeway median. Just far away, please.

Plus it increases traffic on the side roads, and they won’t build a highway to compete w the toll road. The side roads now have 3-5 lanes going one direction, a damn public highway would get people to places faster

>Wouldn’t fast efficient light rail been generally better?

Light rail has been there since before the toll lanes.

This is not a small medical center, some of the hospitals are skyscrapers.

Sure, Chicago’s daily regional transit ridership is 10x higher than Houston though. And they also have skyscraper medical centers. One of them doesn’t even have direct interstate access.

Houston’s red line has similar ridership levels to Chicago’s third busiest L line.

The two metro areas have a very similar population.

Good observation.

In Houston the rail does not actually extend to any suburbs, if they have that in Chicago it would probably make a big difference.

I got the idea when they were building it in Houston that a large bit of the Metro system is geared toward transporting people in lower-income areas who can't afford cars, so they can gain employment downtown and in the med center.

When it comes to toll roads most suburbs have a long-established freeway commute, but directly west from downtown a major suburb is known as the International District containing a large concentration of immigrants. The only traffic solution leading in that direction was built as a tollway instead.

It all started with the Beltway 8 toll bridge with toll that was cheaper than the gas saved by taking alternate routes.

By now the toll road authority has expanded and embraced a growth mindset for so long, and in recent years gotten so expensive, that any upcoming candidate for County Judge may be able to prevail on a single-issue of lowering the tolls alone.

> I got the idea when they were building it in Houston that a large bit of the Metro system is geared toward transporting people in lower-income areas who can't afford cars, so they can gain employment downtown and in the med center.

This is how most US cities view public transit: poor people only.

Only a handful of US cities treat it as something that everyone uses, places like NYC, Chicago, DC, and Boston.

Houston should have an equivalent to the Metra or MBTA commuter rail.

It works in NYC and Chicago because owning a car there is frightfully expensive even if you're middle-class. Parking costs, city fees, higher gas taxes, higher insurance, and massive rush hour congestion all make owning a car unattractive.

Wouldn’t fast efficient light rail been generally better? From a social and economic perspective it would be more efficient. The real problem with that only tends to be political, namely there is a strange aversion to properly built public infrastructure

>there is a strange aversion to properly built public infrastructure

It costs money which taxpayers don't want to pay (unless it benefits them personally,) it requires long term planning which governments are incapable of, and it smells like socialism.

In the medical scenario, having medical workers sit around waiting for the train after they've driven to the station would be a problem if their presence is needed quickly. Or did you also want everyone to cram into high rises clustered around stations?

The point is that use of public transit by ordinary people helps free up the road for EMS vehicles.

What I see on the rail in Houston are health-care workers and office people, but looks like very few doctors or executives.

Idk, man, Europe and like... half of Asia seem to have figured this out, and their healthcare outcomes are better. But sure, this contrived pro-car scenario is why trains don't work.

I think effective light rail is really hard to get right in the US. Think about Houston, its already a a massive asphalt parking lot nightmare, its not very walk-able, it gets hot and humid in the summer. It simply won't work in most of the US. This is not a build it and they will come situation.

> its not very walk-able, it gets hot and humid in the summer.

You Americans are so funny. Japan is hotter and more humid yet public transit and walking are not an issue. Taipei similar story, rapidly building out rail in a hotter place.

You build the rail, then upzome the areas around stations and over time those giant ashfault lots go away and become urban centres.

> You Americans are so funny.

People like you are funny too but its easy to make posts like yours. Density in most urban parts of Japan and Taipei are wildly higher than say a Houston Texas. Again like I said, you are oversimplifying the problem which I get it, its easy to do. I don't think this is as simple as "build the rail, then upzone the area around stations", would happy to be wrong but I think like all of the world there are cultural and historical reasons for the difference.

It would take decades, you need buy in from both tax payers, commercial buildings, retail spaces, home builders etc.

It would be great if you could have a central planner like a China to just build a city with all the infrastructure in place but in places like America, that does not happen and so its a very tough egg to crack. Keep in mind its not just about being hot, definitely lots of Japan and Taiwan are very humid but you are also in city centers that have 8-9x the density of Houston. Lots of things to do and often you are most likely not walking that far, relative for city walking. I could walk a mile in Houston and still have not left my starting spot.

> Japan is hotter

Is it?

https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/9247~143809/Comparison-of...

Having spent time outside in both Tokyo and Houston in July, Tokyo might be slightly cooler but the humidity makes it more unbearable than Houston (even though Houston is already very humid).

Houstonites do not want to live in dense cities. “Just live like East Asians” doesn’t work when the people you are talking to despise the lifestyle of East Asians.

Yes, they'd rather spend 2 hours a day commuting and then grow fat and die young from heart disease. And before anyone says anything: I used to live in Houston. Truly an awful, awful place to live. It's not even a concrete jungle, it's more like a concrete prairie.

You don’t have to agree with them, but yea, that is legitimately the way they want to spend their life. I think that’s the issue with these urbanism discussions. Your preferences are so different that you can’t even comprehend them so you end up talking past each other.

And I can respect that - the problem is that urbanism, at it's core, is an organization problem. It internetly involves other people, regardless of if any one of them wants it to or not.

I mean, ideally, I could say I want to live all on my own in a mansion far away from everyone else. But I still want access to the world's best food, entertainment, and socialization. But it's just not possible.

Everything is compromises. We can't be erecting hundreds of miles of road and acres of parking lots so people have a 10 by 10 foot lawn, you know? And ultimately it will come back to them, too. Because commuting does suck, and I think most people know it sucks. They just can't, or won't, put two and two together on their lifestyle and commuting. They're inherently linked!

Of course there are trade offs. Suburbanites are just happy to spend time commuting in exchange for a big house with a big yard. You are still talking like they don’t realize the tradeoff they’re making instead of accepting that they’ve considered that and come to the conclusion that it’s worth it. They think living in apartments with no personal space sucks more than commuting.

I'm talking like that because even you're not understanding the tradeoff.

The tradeoff isn't live like rats. That's the tradeoff RIGHT NOW, because we designed our cities for maximum suckage.

But really, you can have reasonable space and a decent commute. Light rail goes a long way, and not spending 50% of your land on parking lots does too.

When you design your cities around cars, there are really no winners. People might think that's just the natural cost of having a home, but it's just not. You can have denser cities with more space per person. Because, remember, most of the space in Houston is currently worthless. It can't actually be used by people.

So it's still dense where it matters. The pockets of goodness are just that. Between the roads and parking lots there's little dense pockets of life, and that's where everything actually happens.

Look, think of it this way. If we don't spend 50% of our most valuable space on parking lots, your home can be 50% larger. AND in an area where it matters, instead of in Timbuktu.

I lived in Chicago for 30 years. I didnt own a car for a decade. I’ve been to east Asia. There are massive downsides to living in cities even when done well. People in Tokyo live in tiny spaces compared to American suburbanites. In the parts of Chicago where you don’t really need a car no one has a yard. Public parks are not the same as private yards. People in New York who aren’t Uber wealthy live lifestyles that I personally can not stand. I got out of nyc as soon as I could because I hated living there. Seriously nyc is by far my least favorite of places I have lived. Going back to anything like that is unimaginable for me. I don’t like Houston either but I understand why people do and it’s not because they’re deluding themselves or because they’re close minded to the wonders of urbanism.

Light rail is terrible and anyone acting like it’s not is immediately written off as a non thinker imo. If you’re gonna do rail do it right.

I'm going to blow your mind: people are different! I have lived in several cities in the PNW and New England and now live in Houston metro by choice. It is far easier, more efficient, and more economical for my family which are our priorities. (Also infinitely more diverse, which is a big plus, but doesn't really have anything to do with urban planning). We like it a lot here.

Houston can be very cheap, but it comes with the steep cost of having to live in Houston.

I'm being harsh, Houston isn't completely terrible. There is a lot of culture and diversity. But you can't really get to it because everything is too far, and you're already tired from commuting 10 hours that week.

I live in the area and agree it's quite miserable in some ways. Anything inside 610 is effectively a no-go zone for people who have the capacity to participate on HN. The entire point of Houston is that it's approximately the cheapest place you can live that still has things like an international airport and an Apple Store.

I'd jump at the chance to spend 3hr a day commuting if I got to live in a society that lacked people who look down their nose at my life choices.

Look, I'm not looking down at your life choices, I'm just saying it probably sucks and you would probably prefer it if it wasn't like that.

Meaning, I don't think people are commuting 2 hours or three or whatever because they LIKE to. Rather, they're victims of poor poor urban design, and most of them, too, would prefer not that.

I don't think a single soul is moving to Houston because of the commute. They're doing it in spite of the commute. But wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to do that?

Ultimately its optional, it's a choice. We could have Houston without the commute. Everyone could live the life they want without a commute, if we just put in the time and effort to design our urban spaces around that. And, if people really do want to commute - more power. I don't think that's a desire that will ever be rare to find. But we probably shouldn't be optimizing for shit, right? Or, at least, what I think we both agree most people think is shit.

Lots of healthy people that live in Houston too. Your lack of being able to see that the world is diverse and people have different preferences is a shame.

Completely agree.

I do think there is room for more these "New Urbanist" style developments which I have seen a few of in Texas. w the builder puts retail buildings centralized in the development. Lots of real parks and other type of shared resources for the community. Something where you still have a house with a yard but you can walk to the coffee shop in your neighborhood.

A car can go from anywhere to anywhere else at any time.

A rail system, no matter how fast and efficient, can never get close to matching that.

you only think that because a bunch of roads were constructed for cars

I live in NYC and for the majority of my trips the subway gets me there faster than a car would.

Sure you can find plenty of random places it would take longer for me to get to by train, but for places I actually want to get to, the subway is faster.

OK, you live in the one and only city in the entire USA that is dense enough to make the subway a better option.

I live in the DC area which has an excellent Metrorail system, and it is still nowhere near close enough to being able to replace the average trip by car unless you in DC proper.

Now imagine how much worse things would be in Houston.

> OK, you live in the one and only city in the entire USA that is dense enough to make the subway a better option.

Spoiler: All of them should be this way

You're welcome to try to Trail of Tears everybody into your preferred walled cities, but the attempt would go badly for you.

Absent that we'll need to wait for population growth (not happening, if anything we're going the other way) or immigration (ha) to fill our cities up to NYC density.

Note that NYC itself used to be even more dense than it is today. No other U.S. city is likely to reach even NYC's current density in any near- to medium-time scale.

> Absent that we'll need to wait for population growth (not happening, if anything we're going the other way) or immigration (ha) to fill our cities up to NYC density.

Nope: One need only wait for the financial collapse that is fast approaching nearly every municipality in the US due to the relative scale of infrastructure buildout + maintenance as compared to its tax base.

The "standard" American city is 100% unambiguously completely financially impossible.

This is obscured by the fact that cities traditionally account for their infrastructure as depreciating assets whose value goes to zero rather than as perpetual liabilities with exponentially increasing maintenance costs, where the expected maintenance burden of a road already far exceeds its "asset value" on day one of its creation (when it's added to the city's balance sheet as "an asset.")

The American sprawl pattern is financially impossible.

Nice snark though!

No, a doctor is not getting to you on a fast efficient light rail in an emergency.

i am pro-rail and also pro toll/congestion pricing. i think we need to be realistic that rail is not a solution to all of our problems, and also not really feasible in many parts of the US until we fix the union+environmental review problem.

I mean, medical professionals would live closer without it most likely

I live in the Bay Area and hate HOV lanes. I can look over and see that more than half of the drivers are in violation, and yet it is effectively unenforced. It is a system that punishes people willing to follow the rules.

Asking someone to waste maybe up to an hour of their life everyday to sit there and watch people willing to break the rules speed by and get to be home early with their families breeds massive resentment, and anger. It encourages people to abandon all sorts of social contracts.

Can’t you pay to be in the HOV lane?

Seems like a pretty ideal system. Having that extra lane wouldn’t solve any issues for most drivers. For high occupancy or those willing to pay, it does.

I think you missed this point:

> I can look over and see that more than half of the drivers are in violation, and yet it is effectively unenforced.

How do you know that those people aren't paying?

OTOH, I don't know how you could effectively enforce that single occupant vehicles are paying.

The FasTrak scanners above the lane flash the occupancy setting (1, 2, or 3+) on the driver's transponder. It's easy to observe cheating single-occupant vehicles because the flashed number is 3 (a toll-free rate).

For automated enforcement, there's prior art in red light camera systems that mail tickets/violations to the registered vehicle owner.

Yeah, but you pay the full fare with 1 person, half with 2 people, and it's free with 3+.

It's something that isn't straight obvious though. When I got there I also thought that people were just in violation of the people requirement.

I don't get the point of the occupancy reader if there's no hard-requirement of 3+ in the current zone. Maybe there are some stricter HOV-only lanes nowadays? I left the bay area in late 2023

They did start enforcing a bunch of lanes after COVID.

In Washington state, for one, I know that there used to be a phone number posted periodically for civilian reports of HOV violators. That's gone now with just a warning of the fine amounts.

Yeah and some blind (gender-TBD) Karen reported me on that when they couldn't see my kids sitting in the back seat.

When I worked for a tollway (not SF so maybe they're different), toll violations were enforced by mailing a ticket to the offender after the fact. There weren't any patrols out on the road looking for violators. Don't pay the fine (plus the toll), don't get to renew your license plates. We had agreements with some other states for enforcement against their vehicles in our state. The cameras rarely were unable to get a good enough view of the license plate for the CSRs to not be able to find out whose vehicle it was.

I didn’t miss the point. You had zero way to know if someone is in violation or simply paying to be there.

In the vast majority of Bay Area HOV lanes you cannot pay to be there, that only applies to fasttrack lanes, and in those you can read the occupancy setting of others cars on an overhead screen as they drive though. In both cases you can easily tell, especially in very slow moving traffic who is in violation or not.

Once when bored in very slow nearly stopped traffic during rush hour on a stretch of the 80 with no fasttrack, and in a vehicle high enough to see if there were kids in the nearby cars, I counted a large sample (about 50) cars and found that roughly two thirds of the HOV occupants were in violation.

So basically just another systemic benefit to the more well off

This is how money works. You're expressing anger at the concept of personal property. Yes, those who have more money can afford more expensive goods -- that's the whole point!

It’s not an expensive good - its a commons. The HOV lanes are “rich people super freeways” they are there to help mass transit.

It's a scarce good, which loses most of its value if overused.

The standard Econ solution is to set a price that maximizes throughput. At least some toll roads are attempting to hit that price.

In the US, toll roads are required by law to maintain a certain minimum speed. The price is set based on that.

What law?

I suppose "regulation" would be more accurate, and it only applies to HOV lanes that receive funding from a specific source:

https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freewaymgmt/hovguidance/chapter4.ht...

This covers pretty much all of the lanes that people complain about so I'll stand by what I said.

That's interesting, but also a significantly narrower category than all toll roads.

Sure, but if the complaint is "this was a public road and now you're adding a toll lane" then this is what applies.

On this note, the "rich people super freeways" model actually does exist and works quite well, when implemented as a totally separate tolled highway that runs parallel to the toll-free one. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_407

This is allocating public property, not personal.

The money raised by auctioning access is of some public benefit, but is it enough to offset the deep unfairness of the public granting, for example, software engineers a shorter commute on average than teachers?

Since the roads are paid for by taxes, the software engineers are paying more for them in the first place. Why shouldn't they get more of the benefit?

Because a civilized society is not about "who pays more gets the more benefit" from public infrastructure.

A dog-eats-dog jungle of underdeveloped monkeys in clothing, on the other hand, sure.

If it's a question of fairness, the guy you're replying to has a point. If it's a question of civilization... well, toll roads are kind of inextricable from civilized society.

This is allocating wear and tear on scarce highways. Dividing it evenly by use. Poor people who would never drive on this road should not be subsidizing the use by software engineers, for example (the non-toll model).

> for example, software engineers a shorter commute on average than teachers?

Housing prices already have this kind of effect -- highly compensated employees can afford to live closer to their preferred locations. There's no reason not to allocate road resources to the users who are willing to pay for them (which is a much broader segment of the population than just software engineers). Pricing is a better system than road communism.

Don't forget that having lanes which are guaranteed to be congestion-free is useful to everyone, not just the rich.

If you're in SF and you get a call that your mother is in the hospital in SJ and it's 5pm, you would happily pay $100 in tolls to get there (I think the actual price is less than $20).

Unfortunately, there is no practical way to do this other than by charging money to use the fast lane, and this means that the rich will get more of the scarce resources than the poor.

This is no big deal - it's kind of a tautology, if you really think about it.

>This is how money works. You're expressing anger at the concept of personal property.

The "this is how money works" argument doesn't work well for chattel slavery and it doesn't work well for this either...

In most situations the restricted lane (regardless of how you pick who gets to use it), does in fact benefit everyone else.

Under high congestion traffic throughput plummets. Restricted access to one or more lanes lets you keep them flowing at near the peak, increasing the overall throughput of the system by much more than one of the congested lanes.

The issue is that average number is of little consolation to everyone in the slower lanes.

Most of the Bay Area HOV lanes are not limited access. They let you enter/exit wherever, creating congestion. They also slow down traffic at the points where people have to cross lots of lanes to enter/exit.

When before/after studies have been done, the HOV lanes around here generally make everything worse.

Depends on the location. Some are strictly passenger capacity.

Really, the vast majority of them are, the fasttrack ones are in a few specific spots, but almost all bay area freeways have at least a 3+ only HOV lane.

> Can’t you pay to be in the HOV lane?

On a few of them, but not the ones I commute on and am talking about. If you do use one of the 'pay' lanes, it becomes free if you switch your fasttrak device to '3+' setting, and given the frequency of visually obvious violations in the ones you can't pay for, I would be surprised if many people are actually paying for the ones you can pay for.

^ There's a deep lesson in this comment.

Indeed. Benevolent introverts too often get the short stick for sticking to rules.

I think the benelovent introvert being discussed seems to have overlooked

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FasTrak

What does introversion have to do with this?

> It is a system that punishes people willing to follow the rules.

Every system?

To be fair, this is already true of driving in general. Often in commuter traffic you’ll see one guy driving extremely unsafely, darting in and out of lanes passing everyone as fast as they can. You know this person does this every day for years, saving time by putting everyone else in danger.

Saving a tiny amount of time

Yes, I think Myth Busters did an episode on this. It saves surprisingly little time.

Is it surprising though?

The thrill of weaving through traffic vs the tedium of being the traffic might be the real incentive, whether the driver is consciously aware of that or not.

Its a facto, but I think people also do think it makes more a difference than it does.

One thing I have noticed from using satnav is that even with a mostly motorway journey the difference between driving fast and driving at a more leisurely pace is never more than a minute or two per hour compared to the predicted time.

I knew it from seeing how often I later caught up with someone driving very aggressively, but quantifying it made me realise just how consistent the small difference is.

I'm not sure this is true. In Atlanta, on a very busy two-lane city-street commute into work, I follow traffic laws scrupulously, and have excellent driving skills, but I take every advantage I can that's not illegal or antisocial -- e.g., I always pass people going slower than me, preemptively change lanes to avoid buses and cars I can tell are slow or turning, take small shortcuts that add many more turns to the trip -- which means lots of lane changes, etc. My wife, on the exact same route and time, does not do any of this; she just follows the car in front of her until she arrives. My driving shaves a solid 10+ minutes off of her 40-minute commute this way. That's significant (>25%), and adds up to 20 minutes more time at home with my kids, etc.

And fwiw, I abhor illegal and antisocial driving and wish there were much more enforcement of traffic laws. And where it's a necessary cost, I'd be happy to have a longer commute if we were all safer for it.

I think congestion pricing is probably a net win, and the lesser evil right now, but tolls are so regressive I wish we could do better by making public transport not suck.

> The thrill

I think it's more of the self-deception that they're more important than others and that they're meaningfully getting ahead of others. This is a major issue in American culture where it's not just about doing great, but about doing "better" than others (competitive in areas it's pointless to be competitive about)

I just drive normal and stick to the right unless I'm passing and try to maintain a good speed the whole time - no breaking and reaccelerating. I often see the people weaving and then pass them 5 minutes later because they tried to pass on the right and got stuck behind a semi. Ha.

Idiots that try to pass on the right should get their driver's license revoked immediately.

It generally isn’t even possible or useful to pass on the right if people follow the traffic laws of keeping right unless passing. It becomes necessary only when people are illegally hanging out in the left lanes going slower than the normal flow of traffic.

It’s legal to pass on the right here in MN. States should enforce left lane for passing only, but they don’t. This creates a situation where the left lane has effectively become the right lane and thus you can use the right to pass instead.

E: it is not legal to pass on the right in MN, unless you’re on a multi-lane road; which is basically all major arteries and thus makes this law unenforceable for all intents and purposes.

If you're getting passed on the right, you're doing it wrong.

I don't know why you assume this is about me? Participating in traffic is better if it's predictable, people passing on the right break that assumption.

Not really, it can save serious time if done properly and carefully in a consistent way on a long distance drive. Driving the length of California on I5, you can easily get stuck behind side-by-side slow traffic and spend the entire drive averaging about 60-65mph. Or you can aggressively cut through this isolated 'island' of slowness, and average 80-85mph. Over the ~400 miles from SF area to SoCal, this saves about 1.5 hours each way.

I used to have to do this round trip commute, and could consistently save ~3 hours per week of time by driving more aggressively, and I never got a ticket driving like this doing the commute weekly for years.

I do however try to be as courteous and safe as possible, and would time my lane changes to maintain safe following distances and not actually cut people off. If people would stay right except while passing like they're supposed to, this wouldn't be needed.

Correct.

Whoever downvoted your comment has either never driven this stretch of the 5 or they are the reason it is so bad.

It’s the idiots in cars who insist on doing exactly 65 in the left lane next to a semi that cause the problem. Get past just one idiot holding back hundreds of cars and you will find miles of completely open road.

Its all of those rolling hills where you are going up and down over and over. People don't pay attention and let their car slow down up hills, then let their cars roll up to 90 going back down the other side. Do it over and over and you get the whole centepede effect, except cars far enough back have to practically stop.

You can think of it as basic math. If the speed limit is 60 and you go 70, across a 10 mile drive you save at most 2 minutes... and only if everything is perfect. I stopped driving so fast once I realized that leaving a touch early was the dominant factor.

The solution is surprisingly simple. You just need moderate enforcement of fines that are scaled to the offenders income and that escalate exponentially with reoffense in a reasonable time period.

Fines should be designed to make it uneconomical to continue to reoffend.

You're being downvoted by people for whom this would be incredibly inconvenient.

That should only be the case if the fine was actually prosecuted in court.

Plenty of people pay the fine and admit to guilt to avoid being further penalized with court fees, etc. In other words, many people just pay a injustice fine to avoid more trouble. This would punish those type of people even more.

>Plenty of people pay the fine and admit to guilt to avoid being further penalized with court fees, etc.

The system is in fact architected to maximize this in some states. Virginia and Ohio come to mind.

More than that, you need to enforce the existing laws. Raising the fines but continuing zero enforcement will do nothing.

Pretty sure high fines would greatly incentivize increased enforcement.

Why? The police officer gets paid the same either way. And that's probably in line with how we want it, lest police officers start seeing infractions that don't exist when their daughter's next birthday comes near.

The officer, sure. But departmental policy?

That can help, but policy doesn't execute itself, it's executed through the police officers. Most cities aren't prepared to be able to follow-through to the logical conclusion the steps they'd need to take if their police force is fully intransigent with regard to following policy, so the policy itself is set based in part on what the force itself is willing to enforce.

Either I'm confused or maybe you didn't understand my point - why wouldn't the department want to execute a policy that benefits them greatly through increased revenue? If it's not profitable or desirable to do so, increase the fines.

> The solution is surprisingly simple

Has this been tested and shown to be successful or is your confidence based on feels?

Look up the concept of "day fines", which are used in Finland elsewhere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine

Surprisingly they were experimented with in the UK, for a very brief period of time. But not taken into use.

Every now and again a particularly large fine, often for speeding, will make the news. For example this story does the rounds now and again "Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket":

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

That doesn't answer the question, do they work better than flat fines and points on licenses (that lead to suspensions)?

How do you decide if something like that works? Is it by stats on "repeat offenders", or something else?

All I can say is that when you've been asked to pay €50,000 for speeding I suspect you'll be hesitant to speed again, and so I believe the system works.

So the answer to the original question is that your confidence was based on feels.

> Fines should be designed to make it uneconomical to continue to reoffend.

Great. Fine me $1 million, and I will fight the case with lawyers, thus slowing down the public legal system for thousands of other legal cases, whether traffic related or otherwise.

IDK why this is downvoted. In practice everything is this way. Anything over a few grand is basically an invitation to lawyer up and fight. Whether it's a traffic fine or some local zoning BS this is always how it goes.

And by "IDK" I mean "I have some suspicions but they're not flattering to the community".

High definition cameras are cheap, I don’t see why these “fights” would be costly.

>I don’t see why these “fights” would be costly.

Most of society doesn't share most of HN's pro-jackboot disposition so there'd be warnings, appeals, etc, etc.

As a comparison point, it took a 20yr frog boiling exercise to turn DUI into a huge state revenue stream and that's at least backed by a crime most people can agree is fairly serious. To get the same for less serious crime you'd need to invest even more up front in propaganda because people aren't dropping dead from road infractions today like they were 40+yr ago so your ability to appeal to emotion is even more limited.

We can't even release the Epstein files. We don't go full jackboot on petty crimes with a victim. To think that there's public apetite to ruinously fine motorists out of large sums of money over petty victimless infractions is Luxury Space Communism (TM) type tone deaf lunacy.

And this is all assuming you get a bunch of friendly judges because this stuff is pushing it in terms of what the 6/7/8/14th amendments will tolerate.

Like FFS, get out of your filter bubble people.

That sort of stuff makes for great fantasy for people who fancy themselves central planners but back in the real world it flied in the face of the principals of a) punishment fitting the crime b) justice being blind-ish, which "real society" values far more than internet comment sections would have you believe.

I disagree. Not charging a rich person enough to incentivize them to change means that the punishment doesn't fit the crime for them. Similarly, charging people a fine proportionate to their wealth is much more just than a fine that is devistating for the poor but insignificant for the rich.

I’m generally not a lefty type person, but aren’t resource agnostic fines actually less blind-justice than the alternative?

The wealthy speeder shrugs it off, while the poor speeder has to change their spending allocation in a way that is noticeable and could be challenging.

Why should the punishment have a different impact based on wealth? The felt impact of a monetary fine fundamentally depends on how much money the offender has. Whereas the classic “locked in a cage” punishment affects everyone equally.

The fines are already plenty high, it's just that they are essentially not enforced at all. You could definitely illegally commute everyday in a carpool lane, and expect to maybe get a $409 ticket between 0 and 1 times every 5 years or so.

A $490 ticket every 5 years works out to only $1.88 per week- effectively free for anyone that makes enough money to commute in a car in the first place.

They increase the fine for repeat tickets.

Lucky to see one guy in commuter traffic. I need to drive few times per month during commuter hours and in Seattle area there are few types of such unsafe driving:

1. Trucks - not keeping the lanes, speeding (it's 70mph cars and 60mph trucks, trucks bypass me when I'm driving 70).

2. Old company vans and pickups - that's surprising to me, but I frequently see some old Gutter/Plumbing/Heating van darting in an out of lanes. I'd think they'd get fined or in accident sooner or later, but still.

3. Large pickups. They usually are speeding, going in and out of HOV lane closer to Seattle. Never saw HOV enforced on I90.

The enforcement was somehow increased this year, but only until heavy traffic (you can see it daily 5am-6:30am), but never during heavy traffic, which would be more helpful.

This is one of those things that suffers greatly from selection bias and language games. The people unbothered by minor impolite stuff don't come on the internet and complain. The people who think everyone going 5-over is a crisis do.

If you define dangerous as "how dare that BMW not use a blinker" type moves, yeah that stuff is everywhere.

If you define dangerous as "Y likely to cause an accident given X exposure" then it must be tautologically rare because if people were behaving seriously dangerously get bit by it in fairly short order. I can't remember the last time I saw a "wow, that was really pushing it and in poor taste" move. Weeks perhaps.

You can't see that they're in violation: the RF transponder effects compliance and you pay when using the lane, if you're talking about the lanes i used to use to great effect, for money.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FasTrak )

The FasTrak system shows the occupancy setting, it’s obvious when people are displaying the wrong setting.

Does that setting actually matter? When I lived in the area that had these, I always forgot to set it when the number of passengers in my car changed. I never saw any difference. The charge is the same.

Depends on the area. The 210 in Los Angeles allows you to jump on the toll-lanes for free if you have >= 3 people in the car.

And I think at certain times it's only >= 2 people.

It makes a difference in some locations such as I-580 5am-8pm: https://www.bayareafastrak.org/en/help/using-your-fastrak-fl...

So obvious that I was incorrectly reported by a "fellow" driver when they apparently failed to see my kids riding in the back seat.

Tall driver in a SUV looking down on an open topped convertible isn’t a false positive. But sure, cops occasionally pull people over in HOV lanes for false positives and then let them go.

However, when you’re looking at 100’s of cars doing the same thing false positives only account for a small percentage of that.

Not really sure, but this comment doesn't seem responsive to what I posted (since I was not in an open-topped convertible).

And the point about cops is exactly the issue - there is an actual human who observes and notes that it was a false positive, vs an anonymous report with no counterpoint entered into whatever database is tracking these reports.

i think i must have had a previous generation FasTrak because my rf transponder didn't have an occupancy setting on it. perhaps i had set it up on the web portal. this was over 10 years ago, from east bay to/from cupertino.

I really wish we would have special enforcement for just this (and transit), and just adjust the fines and staffing levels until enforcement breaks even on costs, and evasion is minimal.

And make the fines based on income.

Perverse incentives are a bitch. I can see this becoming speeding as a service.

If they snap the license plate and no fast pass they send a bill in the mail for the full monthly cost of a pass if I recall correctly

Is there any enforcement such as towing and impounding vehicles that don't pay those bills?

You cannot update the registration on your car if you have outstanding fines (at least in CA, but probably in most states).

Driving a car without a registration will (in theory) get you pulled over, and eventually your car will be impounded.

In practice? Car ownership is required to participate in society in most parts of the US and governments are very unwilling to take away people's ability to drive.

>In practice? Car ownership is required to participate in society in most parts of the US and governments are very unwilling to take away people's ability to drive.

Because there isn't support for the iron fisted rules enforcement a lot of HN favors and if the .gov just did it anyway the people would elect politicians who promise to reign that in. Keeping the power on the books and rarely using it is what benefits .gov the most so it's what they do.

the issue is that the HOV lanes are currently full of people who have fast pass but just set it to say they have 3 in the car.

i truly see enough people doing this when i commute that at $500/ticket i could cover my entire state income tax in 1-2 days. seems obviously economical to enforce this.

It would be better if we had congestion pricing for all lanes. Then it would be less of an issue.

The HOV lanes cause absurd amounts of congestion, both from encouraging all the HOV drivers to aggressively switch lanes, and because they greatly increase the speed differential between lanes.

They’re a money / surveillance grab.

Is there data to support this or is this just your hunch? Because I’m betting this is false.

It’s not a money grab as much as moving more of the actual cost of freeways onto drivers who are mostly used to externalizing it

people drive slow in HOV lanes. and the. in the lane next to it, people do too. it destroys the natural speed hierarchy of highway driving.

no one respects that hierarchy anymore anyway in my experience. The HOV lane is usually traveling faster that the passing lane.

I really would like to see a citation for how adding new, congestion-free lanes with limited opportunities for merging to an already congested highway makes it worse.

yeah i think you’re just making up reasons to be mad about something you were going to dislike.

Traffic is one of the most boring fucking things to talk about.

If you want to feel pissed about something: One of the most popular new cars purchased in California was the Jeep Wrangler 4xe, because it gave you HOV access and a $7,500 tax credit, even though nobody charges it and its battery is anemic anyway.

EVs no longer have HOV access.

You're gatekeeping being mad about a system that is asking me to decide between breaking a law/social contract, and wasting hours of my life every week while watching other people break it the whole time?

No, I'm not mad about the Wrangler 4xe, it's really great that plug in hybrid tech is moving into a wider range of vehicles useful for things like rough terrain. A small battery is still plenty for the vast majority of driving people actually do.

If you drive in the FasTrak lanes without an account you pay the fee + $10 surcharge (for a first time violation), and it goes up on the second violation:

https://www.bayareafastrak.org/en/help/invoices-and-penaltie...

I'm having a hard time finding a citation but according to Google's AI summary if the second violation is unpaid they put a hold on your DMV registration, and the fine itself can be sent to a collection agency.

I agree empirically I see people driving through the lane without a tag (i.e., no number shows up in the overhead display), but maybe these are people with FasTrak accounts being lazy?

> but according to Google's AI summary

Rarely a good citation. No pun intended.

Or people who drive over the cones right before the RFID reader

Or lie and set the transponder to 3 people

Or don't have license plates so can't be identified

One annoying thing is I've tried to pay, but can't.

I spend about four to five months per year in the Bay Area, but have Canadian license plates. The website doesn't even let you enter a Canadian plate, or a foreign plate.

So I bought one of the transponders at Walgreens, and just leave it in the glove box because it has 20 bucks or something when you buy it.

But I can't check its status, don't know how much is left on it, have no idea what I'm paying, really sucks.

Go to https://www.bayareafastrak.org/en/home/index.shtml, make an account and link your tag using it's serial number. Hopefully you'll get the information you're looking for there.

As I said, making an account requires a license plate. Even for "Create a Fasttrak account". It's on the second page, demanding a license plate.

Some people just set it to 3+...

We just need better HOV enforcement. Preferably with space lasers.

That's the actual problem with CA in general if you haven't noticed. Be good and watch them take everything.

This is an easy fix. Ditch the HOV element and make the lane toll-only. Tolls already encourage carpooling -- more people in the car means less toll per occupant.

strong agree. i like the HOV lanes in concept, but the reality of California means they should just be toll lanes.

people also drive slow as shit in HOV lanes

>I live in the Bay Area and hate HOV lanes. I can look over and see that more than half of the drivers are in violation, and yet it is effectively unenforced. It is a system that punishes people willing to follow the rules.

There's a lesson about society and government in there.

That's not a good reason to hate HOV lanes. That's a good reason to hate the enforcement policy. In Boston there is a trooper at the entrance that will jump in front of violators and pull them over.

> you can take the slip roads almost everywhere but they’re slow.

We have that problem here in Germany. The roads aren't just slow - the people living in the towns these roads run through are going through hell because they are affected massively. Can't safely cross the road, emergency response vehicles take ages, an insane amount of noise and emissions (because vehicles near idle make much more toxic exhaust when at low load and thus temperature), more brake and tire dust... Austria was fed up years ago, Bavaria recently followed suit [1].

[1] https://www.adac.de/der-adac/regionalclubs/suedbayern/news/a...

In NYC it's the police that have been obfuscating their plate number for a long time, not just poor people. https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/04/19/if-nypd-is-cracking-d...

In Tennessee (other states, too), it is not illegal to have a trailer hitch ball in front of your license plate. They're recently begun erecting ALPRs everywhere...

...so I have a trailer hitch ball hung entirely across my plate — not considered "obstructing view" de jure, but YMMV (depending on officer).

Tennessee does not issue license plates for most trailers, either, so you can easily & even more legally conceal your license plate when towing.

Anything else that obstructs the view is illegal (including bicycle racks, leaves, dirt, lenses). But not trailers & hitch balls.

These are not commonly called slip roads in Texas - the term is feeder road. Most feeder roads in the metro areas are lined with business or multifamily residential frontage.

These are not commonly called "slip roads" nor "feeder roads" — they're actually called frontage roads.

Yes, they are called both frontage roads and feeder roads by Texans interchangeably. Frontage roads is the official term but feeder is the lingo. Obvious to anyone who knows real Texans.

People from small Texas towns (Louisiana too) and no big city driving experience still know what "feeder" roads are.

You can still throw them way off giving directions if you tell them to get off the freeway at Frontage Road, especially with a French Cajun accent ;)

Loads of exits in all locations and directions have a lone sign at the ramp simply saying "Frontage Rd." pointing at the exit.

You have to look at a sign miles earlier to know what exit it really is.

Or in the case of one particular long causeway on I-10 through Louisiana... Might need to drive by the sign three times to learn the pronunciation and spelling.

> or which have license plate covers is unacceptable because the poor do this most frequently

There's a YT channel where a guy exposes these. He found that one of the most common group of offenders in NYC was ... cops and their personal vehicles.

I dislike them not so much in my home area but everywhere else where I have no idea what I'm doing and worry that I'm going to come home to a ton of envelopes full of enormous fines. This is made worse as cash payment disappears.

Here in Norway we have funded the vast majority of new highways and similar by turing them into toll roads. The government might chip in but some fraction is covered by toll.

An issue is that it's set up as a regular loan, which the collected toll repays. So over the lifetime of the loan, often more than half is interest. Add administration costs and in some cases the actual money spent on the road is a small fraction of the total toll paid.

That said, in principle I think it's fair to have some use-based pricing. Same goes for public transportation. Studies have shown it's not ideal to have free public transportation, but rather a low fare.

Once paid off do the toll roads in Norway become non-toll?

That’s the only idea that makes sense to me.

That's the general idea, and typically followed. I've experienced several transitioning to non-toll.

The ones in the cities have a tendency to stay though, as they find new infrastructure projects to finance.

Anything the poor do more frequently should be punished more severely.

Personally I just hate that I have to go on the roads with the poors to avoid the surveilance that powers the toll roads.

A real conservative! A rare find these days ;)

I take the toll roads because I am less likely to encounter uninsured heaps of trash on four wheels that have even less disregard of others.

Indeed, I just wish one didn't have to submit to relative increased surveillance to do it.

> Overall, I think fare at point of use is a great structure. In the past we couldn’t enforce it but now we can do this for more things.

I don't agree. Price "discrimination" for government services is not acceptable. The perverse incentives that sets up are far too strong and the profits too juicy to avoid corruption.

We have historical analogs (paying for fire service and the corruption that caused in Rome). We have modern analogs (money from marijuana funding police forces that then arrest marijuana offenders and fight legalization efforts).

Letting price discrimination enter government services is simply a road to corruption and disaster.

i think we have far more examples of things working fine than the reverse. there are plenty of government assisted things (water, electricity, transit, etc etc etc) that we pay for at point of use. you can’t just hand wave at “corruption” and claim that resolves everything.

I would actually argue that your examples prove my point.

The best transit systems are the ones that are almost fully subsidized with a token payment that doesn't price discriminate. We have strong examples of the problems with price discrimination in water (the entire American Southwest). Electricity "markets" gave us Enron and semi-privatized electric companies are currently giving us shutdowns because they are liable for causing fires--neither of these would be an issue if electricity is a flat market based on usage without price discrimination.

Everything you mentioned used to be what we called a "utility" and was the job of government to provide, oversee and generally subsidize. It was only since about 1980 that governments started trying to "privatize" these kinds of things with the magical thinking that somehow "profit incentive" would magically make them cheaper to run.

Yes, usage above and beyond basic levels was generally paid for at "point of use"--especially if the resource was limited (see: water). However, that payment needs to be somehow "metered" and with pricing that rises significantly as usage moves further from baseline in order to disincentivize over-consumption.

In the case of tolls (which started this discussion), that means the baseline price should be set to "damage incurred" which is "fourth power of weight" (if I remember correctly). Cars should be a low price; brodozers should pay significantly more than cars; loaded semis should pay a lot more. Adjust as necessary based upon time and load in order to manage traffic.

By linking to something directly meterable, you avoid the perverse incentives where the poor get disproportionately hit and the rich simply ignore everything (see: Nestle pumping water out of aquifers).

HOV lanes in the bay area are terrible. We pay to build these lanes and then the government makes us pay to use them? Seems terribly unfair. Its also unfair to make the poorer people spend more of their time commuting than the wealthy.

You don’t have to be wealthy to pay to use them, you just have to value the time savings more than others. Imagine a “poor” person late for their job where they will get fired, they might value the lane more than a “rich” person just cruising around for fun. Whereas if it weren’t an option at all the poor person in this scenario loses their job and is strictly worse off.

I feel like you dont live in the bay area. In peak traffic time, those lanes cost like $20+ to drive in.

Your assumption that rich people spend less for fun than poor people can afford to spend to survive is not something I think I'm confident enough in to trust it as the basis for policy like this.

Also isn’t it more fair to charge people using the roads than everyone? What if someone doesn’t even drive should they have to pay taxes for roads?

And in the absence of these congestion fees we’d likely have to take taxes overall. That would probably be even worse for poor people.

Who doesn't use the roads? How would you get anywhere without taking a road? Even if you didn't drive, whatever transport you're using except maybe a helicopter, would use the road.

Not everyone uses the roads the same amount. It would disincentivize having a job with a 40 mile commute.

Also trains/subways are obviously another non-road transport option.

i don’t agree with the notion that everything provided by the government must be free at point of use, seems like a childish and foolish way of running a society with real resource constraints.

Childish and foolish? That's the way these roads have been utilized for decades before someone figured out a way to extract more tax dollars from the public.

Toll roads are corrosive to the American spirit. They are low-trust, f-u-i-got-mine, and they breed resentment both between economic classes and between people who follow the rules and people who don't care about them. They are the HOA of traffic management schemes.

Toll roads are the worst. The fact that there are increasing numbers of them is as much a bellwether of the death of the American experiment experiment as anything else.

They are no longer HOV lanes. They are toll lanes with a minor HOV discount beard.

Tolls are a regressive tax; they disproportionately affect the poor.

They're wrong on multiple fronts, they're regressive. The poor bear the brunt of them.

Despite the bad press, a well run government highway is much cheaper, generally 30% or more of that toll goes directly to maintaining the system and it's profits, there's more efficient funding methods out there.

They're natural monopolies, they fill up with traffic regardless of how much you rip people off.

> The poor bear the brunt of them.

Going to need a citation for that, because it seems the wealth(ier) and/or business-classes would bear the most significant burden of toll roads.

Typically, in my experience, tolls are assessed at boundaries of cities, regions, and intra-region/city transit is toll-free.

Businesses that use the toll road (think trucking/freight, etc) pay tolls because they come from outside of the boundary. Wealthier individuals may commute into the boundary for work, also paying tolls.

One can live inside the city of San Francisco and never pay a toll - but someone that lives outside and commutes in for work or business pays tolls every day.

Other states, such as Illinois have a vast amount of toll roads - where tolls are trivial (typically) but also still only assessed at boundaries. The roads are often much more well maintained than government roads, since the toll collector has a direct financial interest in maintaining traffic on the roads.

Here in Chicagoland, the major tollways aren't boundary oriented, they're just charging effectively per mile. The same is true of my home state of Indiana. They were supposed to be free once the bonds were paid off, but, of course, that never happened.

When I was in the Chicago area, I paid no tolls when I entered and exited the tollway within the same region. Perhaps that has changed within the last 10ish years?

It doesn't seem practical to charge tolls at every onramp.

It was very much on and off for many years. It was intended to cover the costs then go away. Instead they installed stream lined overhead tolls to not have to wait at the toll booth anymore and now it's just a perpetual tax.

It's also partially owned by outside investment (specifically the skyway from Indiana)

Very interesting. That still doesn't imply the "poor bear the brunt" (the original GP's assertion). Likely the inverse - since again, businesses and wealthy individuals are going to travel by vehicle vastly more than "poor" individuals.

Plenty of poor people drive, and the tolls aren't really adjusted for income.

Ha ha, definitely changed in the last year or two. I've been to Chicago a few times only to get a nice bill in the mail for tolls (I live two states away). When it's all done electronically, you sometimes have no idea you've had your pocket picked. ;-)

It is zone-based. If you are close enough to a plaza, you won't be tolled getting on, if you're just after a plaza, you won't be tolled getting off. The toll for each ramp is more expensive the further it is from a plaza. It's possible for you to hit only one ramp toll in a short run, but if you were to math the total paid on any given route it will work out to be roughly linear with your distance.

>but, of course, that never happened.

Because there is no consequences for the peddlers or the supporters.

You wouldn't take seriously someone who advocates with a straight face for reinstating prohibition or segregation yet it's perfectly socially acceptable to say "no, it will be different this time".

It's not just toll roads. You see this with every recurring bad thing.

Yeah work from home, but all the jobs for the less well off require driving.

The point of the article is that you're paying one way or another. Roads aren't free to build and/or maintain... in fact, it's extremely expensive to build and maintain them. It's just that all levels of gov't have allowed revenues from the gas tax get inflated away by both regular inflation and increased fuel efficiency.

Determining who pays to maintain these systems is a political decision, but it certainly makes sense that we should really be charging people who use them. Adding a luxury tax to folks who want to skip traffic seems like a free lunch for everyone else. At the end of the day, suburbanites want to force the rural and urban dwellers to subsidize their primary mode of transportation (large, dense highways), but it's becoming more and more politically untenable.

I think the most important thing to think about here, is how this affects long term real estate values and development patterns. Regardless of whether there are tolls or a higher gas tax, the current suburban development pattern is going to get more and more expensive for the end users, but you could have learned that from Strong Towns a decade ago.

>. Regardless of whether there are tolls or a higher gas tax, the current suburban development pattern is going to get more and more expensive for the end users, but you could have learned that from Strong Towns a decade ago.

We incentivize density in this country by having a ton of compliance hoops that increase cost on a per-building basis. People might just decide that they love suburbs so much that they vote for politicians who tell the Strong Towns crowd, the environmentalists and the trades and engineering groups to shove it and we go back to the 1980s and slap up street after street of chap AF single family homes on septic with nary a site plan in site.

> The point of the article is that you're paying one way or another.

Sure, but the point of a regressive vs. progressive tax is who bears the brunt.

The problem with a progressive tax for a service is that there is no pricing mechanism to direct it.

If fewer people drive, and more take the train, how is the state compelled to shift funding?

This is one of the hard problems of politics, and it’s one of the reasons markets have been successful, but most people entirely ignore it.

Again, the point of the article is that we already do not have enough budget for road infrastructure, and the roads are already significantly subsidized by federal highway spending. Any solution of “more taxes on wealth and earnings” is theoretically doable, but practically very difficult. Taxing use seems entirely reasonable.

Probably shouldn't have a progressive tax for a service. You have a progressive tax for things like automobiles, houses, income. A portion of that revenue goes to transportation services that benefit both the public and local business.

> Taxing use seems entirely reasonable.

If by use you mean 18-wheelers, then by all means, tax away. I am pretty sure highways would last for decades with a minimum of maintenance if there were no large trucks on them.

> If by use you mean 18-wheelers, then by all means, tax away. I am pretty sure highways would last for decades with a minimum of maintenance if there were no large trucks on them.

I mean, this is magical thinking. Yes, weight should be taxed, but the vast majority of states restrict trailers to the rightmost lanes. You can see the extra wear and tear. That doesn’t mean that autos aren’t contributing non-trivially.

As truck taxes rise, more of that freight will move to rail, so it’s not an infinite tax base.

They don't have to have any profit, they can be 100% public infrastructure.

And the excess revenue can be used to subsidize transit.

Tax what you want less of, subsidize what you want more of.

A well run public transport system is significantly cheaper.

Public transit systems are only effective in highly-dense, urban settings.

Toll roads are often not within dense urban cities - usually on the outskirts, suburbs, highways, bridges and more. Public transit simply doesn't work in these places because of how large and spread-out the US is.

You’re forgetting how this is all interconnected. Creating the large freeways creates sparse housing that requires freeways. Creating public transport does the reverse.

Before all these massive road developments it’s not like people just sat at home and couldn’t go anywhere.

So what's your proposal? Go back in time 200 years and create a public-transit system?

The US is huge. There is no feasible way to support public transit for 95%+ of it's land-mass. That's not going to change anytime soon, or ever.

Also, most mass-transit systems in the US operate at significant loss, even with government (ie. taxpayer) funding and collecting rider-fare. A lot of public transit systems are in complete disrepair and are severely lacking. Buses and lightrails are never going to be "cheaper", as convenient or accessible as roads and vehicles are.

I subscribe to the opinion that there are probably some good reasons why people in the US tend to spread out when they have the option. I think the problem of collective human action is complex enough that optimizing at the individual level is probably the best we can do. I would rather spend time thinking about how to serve people in ways that they actually want instead of “big idea” approaches.

What I would do is the same as what most cities around the world are doing, spending more on public transport, spending less on roads, implementing tolls and congestion charges, and over time reshaping cities to be better for walking, PT, and cycling.

The US is not unique in having fully adopted cars and ripped up old PT networks. It happened all over Australia which is also a massive very spread out country. But significant effort has gone in to reversing the damage.

There is something deeply wrong about a society that can afford to create hundred billionaires but can’t afford busses.

Infeasible?

Perhaps it is indeed infeasible today because of differences in economics and regulation, but: We already created it once -- for huge areas.

As evidence supporting the notion of this prior existence, I'd like to introduce this 1908 map entitled Electric Railway Map of Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan: https://curtiswrightmaps.com/product/electric-railway-map-of...

(Those lines were real, and they were also generally privately-funded.)

Who cares about 95% of its landmass? You build things where people are, not uniformly across the surface.

The government built infrastructure for low density living because the vast majority of people want to live in low density suburbs, not high density urban areas. Forcing people to live in ways they don’t want to when there are viable alternatives just leads to the government being replaced.

It's the traffic jam at the toll plaza that I completely fail to understand. It massively slows traffic town, creates hazards, it's uniquely unsafe for the workers, it ruins engine and roadway efficiency, and causes engine breakdown on unseasonably hot days.

I cannot imagine that this is the best way to fund roads.

I dont like privatized highways or HOV, but...people still have toll roads? Georgia and Florida and surrounding states have electronic passes and pay by toll if you dont have that.

I have thrown coins into a bucket in at least 15 years.

"electronic passes"

"pay by toll"

These are still toll roads, just a more modern iteration. Toll road ≠ physical cash

I liked the coin bucket because there was a skill about how an efficient driver could toss the change into it without even stopping.

The vast majority of the tolling infrastructure no longer uses plazas. In California and in Texas, the tech exists to prevent you from even noticing. That's not deployed everywhere, especially in areas where they do rate-limiting, like the Bay Bridge, where they need you to slow down and stop when the bridge traffic gets too high, but most areas you wouldn't even notice.

This is also causing problems with people using fake plates and magnetized plates. There's an entire growing industry around it. We're going to have to eventually start requiring some kind of transponder that repeats your plate number for sensors that can't be trivially covered... or you know... just raise the gas tax.

https://youtube.com/shorts/HTVBMPGvZJw

https://youtube.com/shorts/lKXv_bA4lYs

I don't know what toll plaza's you're going through. Here's my typical experience trying to get to a meeting in SFO:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQZ2WkX...

The Bay Bridge Toll Plaza:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/rh9rcJe2nDz5Hnkv7?g_st=ic

You’re photo doesn’t show the metering that happens in the opposite direction.

That's the consequence of 4 freeways all (I-580, I-80, I-880, SH-24) dumping their traffic onto a bridge, and using metering lights to try and keep the bridge itself working.

sounds like you’re just upset about traffic metering, which absolutely does work and is unrelated to tolls.

New Jersey solved this: just put up signs saying “you’re on a toll road, go check what you owe and pay later”. No toll plaza!

Then when you forget, which you 100% will if you’re not dealing with it frequently, or just reasonably assume they’ll send you a bill—ta-da! First communication they send is a nastygram assessing an extra $50 for every toll you forgot to go beg to pay when you got home.

Ingenious way to screw non-locals, and no toll plazas needed!

Aint seen a toll plaza this century. Wth?

That's not really an argument, in europe, automated tolls have existed since 1991 (this was actually the first ever country wide system in the world). [1]

Besides, since about 10 years ago, we also have a lot of automated toll roads where you don't even need to have the Via Verde chip now. You just pass by, it collectes your car plate number and it processes the payment for you. Then it's your responsability to check your inbox for the bill (or to set it up to pay automaticaly).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Verde

Plenty of automated barrier-less toll roads in the U.K. - typically bridges, and of course the London congestion charge zone.

The longest toll road still has (automated) barriers to stop at though - the M6 Toll.

It’s probably necessary long term as gasoline taxes are yielding less per mile as total fuel efficiency improves. The dedicated funding source is necessary because if DOT construction budgets (which are huge) were in the general fund, they would be looted by lawmakers to fund patronage programs and the entire surface transportation network would be unfit for service within 20 years. TxDOT loves NTTA because it’s a huge cash cow and hits non-residents hard. If I have to go to Dallas, I expect to spend at least $25 one way. Usually someone else is footing that bill. By extension, I consider myself very lucky that I don’t have to live there.

Question, where are you usually going where a toll is favorable in Dallas? I haven’t lived there since 2022 but I grew up there and learned to drive in Dallas. There are only a handful of places that require taking the toll to get there and save massive amounts of time. Many times, the access road is almost as fast (especially outside of rush hour). But yea, I guess if you drive the entire length of George Bush/DNT to save 10 minutes, it might cost you that much for a day trip…

It was George Bush/DNT. Usually coming from out of state to Plano or downtown Dallas

I'm curious, do you have any data for that (and of an actual "a well run government highway)?

In my country, there were several "scandals" (altough I don't think anyone ever got arrested) about highway construction and how they massively went over budget. I can also say that when they are new, they are great to ride, but, since the budget only thinks about construction, after a couple of decades they start degrading badly until a new massive budget is again used for major work on them.

> The poor bear the brunt of them

But consciously, at least where I live. There are definitely optional non-toll routes around me. Toll roads come at a financial cost to offset a time cost. Non-toll roads come at a greater time cost vs financial cost. If someone chooses to use a toll road regardless of their personal financial circumstances because the value to them is worth the time savings…so be it.

All roads and their usage comes at a cost, toll roads just at more of a cost due to their additional overheads. What you end up with is a more expensive path that disincentivizes a public path there. Drivers on it pay the overheads of the tolls, drivers avoiding it continue to pay more in gas and wear. Everyone would pay less if it were just a public path.

Seems to me you are focused on money rather than time here. However, people using these road are not in alignment with that metric. What’s important is not the cost, but the value. Why choose a toll road over a public path from A to B? It’s all about saving time—that’s the value the transaction provides those users.

If a toll road becomes public, its value goes away because traffic increases on it, eliminating any benefit of traffic reduction that provides time savings that the gate keeping of the charging a toll provides. Also this notion of “everyone now bears the cost of the road” creates damage. That cost now hits the folks who don’t want to use it currently because they do not see its value. All you have done is hurt both the drivers of the road and the drivers who do not use the road by “sharing the burden” and making it public.

I'm not sure money and time are cleanly separable metrics for this in that changing one changes the other, which is why it's not as simple as looking at the toll roads' dynamics in isolation. If a region spends more on transport infrastructure then the average transit time is going to be less (and conversely the opposite) for pretty much any method of buildout except fraud. The notion of "everyone now bears the cost of the road" causes the roads to be optimized towards the average public good. This is not to say it's without tradeoff to anybody at all - just that it's geared towards the best tradeoff for everyone as a whole. The notion of "those able to bear the cost and extra overhead of the toll road bear its cost" certainly still causes a reduction in time for those willing and able to pay, but only for the able who now have no interest in their public infrastructure funding duplicating a path they already have for the common good.

That's where the shift in burden to the poor so the rest can have shorter commute comes from. If everyone had the same opportunity cost to use the toll road then it wouldn't have the shift in burden as much as a pure shift in utility. Of course it doesn't have the same opportunity cost, so who benefits from the toll road is more slanted than who benefits from the public road. Whether or not the shift of burden is acceptable/ideal is a matter of opinion on public policy, but it's there.

> I'm not sure money and time are cleanly separable metrics for this in that changing one changes the other, which is why it's not as simple as looking at the toll roads' dynamics in isolation

Sure they are, tolls regulate the amount of traffic on a toll road and should hopefully decrease congestion and improve travel time. Eliminate the tolls, you will gain more traffic, more congestion, and more travel time. This will diminish its utility in that regard and it becomes yet another congested path.

> If everyone had the same opportunity cost to use the toll road then it wouldn't have the shift in burden as much as a pure shift in utility

Not that sure that a Marxist-style “equity” argument is all that convincing here. There is no huge mass public benefit here in eliminating an existing toll road. Your only true benefliciaries of this change are those people 1) who have to go from point A to point B, 2) need to arrive somewhat sooner than they do now (and can’t leave any sooner to get there) and 3) cannot afford the toll to get there faster under any circumstance.

Seems like that’s a pretty small subset of folks. Everybody else probably falls into 2 basic categories. Those willing to pay the toll to get there sooner—-but they lose the time benefit in your world. Those not willing to pay to get there sooner—but they now get the privilege for paying for a road they were choosing to not pay for before. Seems to me the bulk of the affected, lose.

Bear in mind, I am only arguing against the elimination of existing toll roads. Public infrastructure needs are what they are and region planners should make best efforts to deliver reliable and reasonable road infrastructure for its population. However, there is no doubt that toll roads can help improve overall transportation needs. So if a beneficial road can be created sooner if its costs can be offset via toll vs. waiting until public money is available to fund the construction, I think there is value to be explored there.

> Sure they are, tolls regulate the amount of traffic on a toll road and should hopefully decrease congestion and improve travel time. Eliminate the tolls, you will gain more traffic, more congestion, and more travel time. This will diminish its utility in that regard and it becomes yet another congested path.

That is (further) evidence the two metrics are linked, not that they are independent.

I'm also not convinced lack of use is a great measure of utility either, I think the measure of utility you're actually chasing is, still just average time for the group defined to use it. I.e. don't get the way tolls try to achieve their utility conflated with what that utility actually is.

> Not that sure that a Marxist-style “equity” argument is all that convincing here. There is no huge mass public benefit here in eliminating an existing toll road. Your only true benefliciaries of this change are those people 1) who have to go from point A to point B, 2) need to arrive somewhat sooner than they do now (and can’t leave any sooner to get there) and 3) cannot afford the toll to get there faster under any circumstance. > > Bear in mind, I am only arguing against the elimination of existing toll roads. Public infrastructure needs are what they are and region planners should make best efforts to deliver reliable and reasonable road infrastructure for its population. However, there is no doubt that toll roads can help improve overall transportation needs. So if a beneficial road can be created sooner if its costs can be offset via toll vs. waiting until public money is available to fund the construction, I think there is value to be explored there.

Your list of 3 potential reasons still excludes ones I had already laid out in my initial reply and is focused more on identifying those who would find paying a toll worthwhile rather than any consideration of the overall cost effectiveness of adding a toll road to the network. How much people are (or aren't) willing to pay for a toll road that only tells which toll roads will be profitable, not how efficient the return on investment is in terms of the road system as a whole.

It's also not clear what you mean by "eliminate". If you mean "dig up and demolish" then I'd agree, that'd be throwing the baby out with the bath water. What's built has been built, you'd need good reason to un-build it completely. If you mean "just not have them be tolls" then no, it really does end up being more efficient on average - even if it doesn't seem it to the people who were paying the toll before.

Tangential, but: Cars are in part so problematic because they are a means of transportation designed for a handful of people, but mostly used by a single person. All the alternatives are either unpopular to most people (like bikes, or public transport), or obscure (small one-person cars). Especially the US just converged to this impractical de-facto standard in size and shape.

The alternatives are impractical due to all the space cars and their infrastructure consume (walking, transit), or due to the danger cars pose (bicycles, motorbikes, small cars).

The US has converged because we are trapped in a vicious cycle.

The cycle would have broken in 2008 if we hadn't bailed out the auto manufacturers. Pro-free market until the moment it counts.

Wait, what would that have changed? Are you imagining that we’d have fewer cars in America in 2025 if we hadn’t bailed out the manufacturers in 2008?

Obviously it's not instantaneous, and you still have imports wanting to fill the vacuum, but a collapse of the US auto industry means 1) lower replacement rate in the near term as the remainders try to ramp up production, 2) difficulty servicing the legacy fleet, and 3) a massive blow in terms of sentiment and outlook. In this hypothetical, an American institution blew itself up and made a lot of people's lives more difficult. Do you think they earn that trust back easily? Or is it a post-bust clarity moment, where people finally have a moment to think about how much money is poured into their personal cars and auto infrastructure writ large?

Because, I mean, we did see something similar to that with the pandemic and a mass shift in perspectives on work culture, which corporations had to fight mightily to hobble. You also saw a similar shift during the Great Depression, and it took banks literal generations to rebuild their reputation with the public. In both cases, you saw massive ramifications for the way in which people lived.

I do think that no auto bailouts in 2008 ends America's love affair with the car as we knew it. So, yes, fewer cars. Or maybe, at least, different cars.

Why would not Toyota et al have just filled the high-demand vacuum?

This isn't a compelling alternative future theory at all.

I already addressed that. It takes time to ramp up production. In the meantime, Americans would have wanted action on the part of their political reps. The obvious out for those reps would have been expanded mass transit, as production costs and timing for a bus or train are going to be more advantageous than the amount required to put the equivalent number of people in cars.

If you want to pass judgment, please try to understand the argument first.

It seems extremely presumptive to think the thousands of jurisdictions across the US would somehow bid out, contract, receive, and begin operating fleets before Toyota et al simply scaled up or redirected shipments.

The much more specialized, lower scale, less adaptive manufacturers of public transit vehicles would face an even more severe form of the same problem Toyota would have, except they'd encounter it after years of normal procurement slowness.

That seems very unlikely to me. I think these car companies would all have been purchased for pennies on the dollar, likely by foreign companies in part, and would be making just as many cars today.

It depends. Part of the calculus for the original bailout was the homeland security aspect of potentially turning over companies and the market to foreign competitors, which doesn't go away just because the federal government misses its window to save GM et al. I don't know that such a purchase is a quick process. Either way, it's disruptive to production.

Public transportation in a lot of places isn’t safe especially when traveling with women or children

Women and children aren’t inherently dangerous. If you just avoid eye contact and keep to yourself, you should be fine

Must not be enough cops to either stand around and do nothing or beat the wrong guy to death then.

This is just simply not true, not if you compare apples to apples. Cars are the most dangerous form of transportation and nothing even comes close. You're 100x more likely to die in a car above the subway in NYC than on the subway. Thats not an exaggeration, that's the actual figure.

And then people invariably talk about theft or getting beat up, forgetting that most car accidents don't kill, they injure. And they're extremely expensive.

Cars might FEEL safer because you're in a little box away from everyone else. But it's the exact same everyone else. Still the same amount of crazies and sociopaths.

Except now, they're also in little steel boxes that weight 2,000 pounds going faster than any human was ever meant to go. And they're in full control.

Public transportation is a no go because there are too many drug addicts, and violent lunatics out there. When I worked in the city in Miami, I enjoyed taking the train into the city. It was stress free and a fun quiet time. But then homeless started harassing the stairs and it became terrible.

Almost 25% of Americans are rural as well… bikes and public transportation are never going to work for them. In fact, cars don’t always work for rural folks - a lot of them benefit from (if not outright need) trucks.

If we could solve transportation for 75% of the U.S., I would be pleased.

I always get confused by people saying public transportation makes no sense for rural people. I think it makes more sense, provided you use the right kind of public transportation for the right kind of rural community.

A large, spread-out community? Perhaps not so much.

But a small town where 80% of the people commute to surrounding cities? That'd be a great case for 1 or more commuter train, depending on direction and demand.

That is the UK basicially. You need some connecting dots probably to make it worthwhile.

But even then if the train is hourly you need to be organized. No going out ona whim.

It’s second nature very quickly. Our train into Oxford leaves at ten past the hour. You find yourself thinking “oh, I’ll aim for the ten past eleven” an hour or two beforehand and organise your morning accordingly. It’s absolutely no hardship.

A century ago, it was somewhat normal for any American town over 10,000 people to have at least one streetcar. Most towns also had an interurban connection to the next (larger) town, which would then have more streetcars, long-distance train connections, etc.

This is despite urbanization being lower then than it is now[1]. Some of that is because Americans became wealthier and demanded private alternatives to mass transit, but a lot of it is because we chose, as policy, to deprioritize effective mass transit.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...

Truck are popular because of culture, not a necessity. Unless you're working a farm or something like regularly hauling dirt, than they are less practical than a sedan even.

I disagree, something I learned pretty quick when we moved out of the city. How do you haul your trash to the dump when there is no pickup service in your area? How do you acquire a replacement dishwasher, oven, refrigerator, or big screen TV when you are outside the delivery area of the appliance store? Need a cord of firewood? A bed of mulch? Topsoil for the garden? 2x4s for a deck or workbench? Etc. Etc.

Trucks become more practical in rural areas because of the lack of amenities that exist around cities and towns.

They're popular in cities and suburbs where they are useless. I said they were useful out in farmlands. Half of what you said can fit in an SUV anyway. There is not place like that anywhere near where I live and trucks are still extremely common, most of my friends have one. They're all white collar. Most have bed covers or a trunk installed in the bed. I find it's really funny when people buy trucks and put a ton of effort into making the bed almost as useful as a trunk.

Despite this, cars will be the best - cheapest, fastest - means of transportation to most of the society until we have transparent crruptionless (AI?) governments. Apart a few cases - extreme distances (air), multimillion metro areas, handful of asian coutries due to culture - public transport is a mostly failed idea.

> public transport is a mostly failed idea.

Citation needed. I have been to many cities where I would never drive a car, but public transport is fine.

> obscure (small one-person cars)

I believe it's called motorbike or scooter. Very popular in Asia.

also Europe. Everywhere but in the USA where there's no other transport options besides the road. Makes no sense whatsoever.

Additional to your point:

1. Women do not find guys in tiny cars to be attractive

2. Cars in America are becoming an arms race in terms of danger to others (tall front grills, heavier)

3. Liability/Regulation is too low. We'd see safety go up if we made the minimum insurance $5M , instead of $30000. Also if our police actually enforced traffic laws, including tags and insurance.

Toll roads are good economics. If a choice has negative externalities (more traffic, more pollution, road damage), tax it.

It’s also a direct usage tax to support road maintenance. Heavier users of the road ways end up contributing more to the maintenance of the public good.

We had a proxy for that via gasoline taxes but with EV becoming more common we need to find a replacement for that revenue.

The gas tax hasn’t kept up with inflation, EVs are only a secondary contributor to the shortfall. Most states have been leeching from their general funds to keep up with highway maintenance. California has raised theres fair aggressively, though.

There are several states that have an EV registration surcharge that replaces gas tax. It's not popular with the pro-EV crowd.

I'm fine with a decently fair registration tax to offset the gas taxes, but the one in my state is the equivalent of 1,000 gallons of gas for the state gas taxes. If the car was a 35mpg hybrid that would be 35,000mi of equivalent driving. This is incredibly unfair.

If I owned an ev for 3 years, the tax means I save money.

This is a yearly tax. So that would be the same as 105,000mi in three years meanwhile the average car probably only drove ~37,500 in that time period.

35,000 mi of driving is not anywhere near out of the question if you're a daily commuter who takes road trips once in a while. If you're driving a truck or a non-hybrid, it's also a lot less mileage. It sounds like this is actually close to what you would be expected to use.

It's far away from the average of around 12,000. Few cars drive 35,000mi.

The average driver also doesn't get 35 mpg driving regularly. The average driver probably gets around 20 mpg, and that would make this distance about 15000 mi.

The kind of people choosing an EV wouldn't get a 20mpg car, it's an unfair comparison.

They also chose a car that's extremely heavy (by virtue of the battery), so they create more road wear per mile than the average American car. The point is that tax rate seems fair.

The ICE I would have picked otherwise is only 100kg lighter and gets 40mpg.

And you’d be paying gas tax

Far less than what I'm paying with the EV, which is my point!

> With that information, the British newspaper calculated that BEVs [battery electric vehicles] could expose roads to 2.24 times more damage than gas cars.

If that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" isn't far off.

Ref: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/bevs-could-also-damage-ro...

Just because a small percentage of drivers drive that much each year doesn’t make it a reasonable number for the general case.

It sounds like this is actually close to what you would be expected to use.

Not even close to what the average driver drives.

The average American driver gets about 25 mpg and drives about 15-20k miles. That's exactly in line with the tax rate here.

Seems unlikely.

55 miles/day, 365 days a year? Also, look at lease mileage limits.

The average American car does not drive 20k miles. 12,500 is the average yearly mileage.

And it's an EV, a closer comparison should be something more like a hybrid. It's not a giant truck.

But it weighs as much as a giant truck

It weighs about as much as the smallest base model F150. Optioned out models and other trim levels easily hit 1,000lbs+ heavier.

Meanwhile that base model equivalent weight F150 gets about 24mpg and thus pays about half as much gas tax while doing the same amount of damage driving the average mileage. Further proving my point, I pay twice the state fuel tax for an equivalent weight pickup truck. Is that fair?

But also, isn't the whole point of the pickup truck to load it down? If all it's doing is carrying 1-4 people it's whole life, seems like a lot of waste. I'm told people buy trucks to actually load them down a lot and not just commute and get groceries? So while it's about the same weight dry and unloaded shouldn't it's weight really be quite a bit more in practice? Or are we all agreeing now trucks are just for commuting and getting groceries?

Now you've moved the goal posts to about half of your original claim. And it's still not accurate (links have already been provided elsewhere in this thread). And the only thing I've owned in the last 30 years that gets 25 mpg is a camper van (and, no, that thing doesn't move anywhere near 15K miles/year).

> With that information, the British newspaper calculated that BEVs [battery electric vehicles] could expose roads to 2.24 times more damage than gas cars.

If that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" isn't far off.

Ref: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/bevs-could-also-damage-ro...

The EV tax applies to people who a) casue a disproportionate amount of wear & tear on the roads vs ICE vehicles and b) are generally higher income in the state.

When you look at taxation from a "charge the people who use it" or the "the rich should pay more" perspective, this appears to address both.

Is the problem simply that you want to pay less taxes?

No, I just want to pay a fair amount of taxes. Honestly the gas taxes should be increased or we should move to a tax structure where it's mileage, weight, and emissions based.

Paying 3x the same taxes while having less externalities isn't fair.

As I've cited elsewhere on this thread:

> With that information, the British newspaper calculated that BEVs [battery electric vehicles] could expose roads to 2.24 times more damage than gas cars.

Ref: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/bevs-could-also-damage-ro...

If that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car in the externalities of road wear & tear.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" is at most 25% higher in a "damage per mile equivalent" but could be as little as 6% using the averages.

If your actual mileage is over 15625/year, then you're paying less than the equivalent.

What's your annual mileage?

27 isn't 35 no matter how many times you say it is.

> If your actual mileage is over 15625/year, then you're paying less than the equivalent.

The average is less than that by a decent bit, so more than half of US cars are paying more even with your unproven, contorted math based on some estimates done once in the 70s and never really looked into closely again.

It's also assuming the difference in weight. The closest hybrid I would have bought instead is only like 100kg lighter than my EV. And it gets like 40mpg, better than 35mpg.

It would also mean semi trucks should pay like 20,000x more in registration fees. Does this make sense?

> What's your annual mileage?

Less than 15k on that car (like most people), so even with your assumed math it's overpaying.

Semi trucks pay huge amounts in gas taxes because they guzzle gas like nobody's business. It's only the EVs that aren't paying for their road wear in gas taxes.

20,000x more in taxes?

Realistically speaking, they probably do. Do you know how much fuel they use and miles they drive per year?

Average class 8 truck (>33,000lbs) burns under 11,000GGEa year, ratio is 1GGE=1.13gal of diesel. So somewhere under 12,500gal of diesel on average, but we'll use that to lean even more in the truck's favor.

https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10308

Are you suggesting the average car burns less than 1 gallon of gas a year?

A 20mpg car driving 12,500mi (the average ICE in the US) would use 625gal of gas. So more like 20x, maybe 40x if the per gallon tax of diesel is double. Pretty dang far off from 20,000x.

And they're doing way more miles while being massively heavier, meaning incredibly more harm on the road than whatever EV you're thinking.

GGE: Gasoline gallon equivalent

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent>

(Most tractor-trailor rigs burn diesel rather than petrol.)

You keep repeating it, but it's reductive at best and incorrect as a general assumption.

Is there another model you'd recommend to estimate/compare road wear and tear?

1:1 is at least as good a default assumption.

Based on numerous studies, we already know it's not 1:1 so why bother starting with a default assumption that we know is wrong?

Do you have an alternative analysis? I'd love to check it out.

> Based on numerous studies

I do agree the relationship probably isn't linear, but the fourth power rule doesn't necessarily have numerous studies confirming it. It was a small collection of studies on road wear the US highway administration did in the 1950s and pretty much everyone has just gone with that. Other studies have pointed to it being less than previously thought.

https://discovery.ntroknowledge.com.au/discovery/fulldisplay...

Throwing even more weight against your 12,000mi is really 35,000mi equivalence.

Thanks for the insight but my claim was never "12,000mi is really 35,000mi"

Regardless, it would be interesting to see the actual number worked through to see what the equivalent EV registration fee should be if road damage/maintenance is the sole factor.

> If the car was a 35mpg hybrid that would be 35,000mi of equivalent driving.

> that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" isn't far off

You absolutely did suggest me paying taxes for 12k miles is practically the same as ~35k miles, you said it several times. That it's not far off. How else am I supposed to read that? You were so sure of it you mentioned it many times.

> Regardless, it would be interesting to see the actual number worked through to see what the equivalent EV registration fee should be if road damage/maintenance is the sole factor.

Sure, but it's likely far less than what I'm paying. As mentioned elsewhere, a similar weight unloaded F-150 pays half the taxes. So I'm at least paying double for similar weight vehicles, and yet you tell me it's really only 6%. But sure, tell me again how I'm really just paying my fair share and 12 = 35.

> If that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car in the externalities of road wear & tear.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" is at most 25% higher in a "damage per mile equivalent" but could be as little as 6% using the averages.

^ As you quoted, I used the formula to estimate 12k would be equivalent to 27k and said paying taxes equivalent to be 35k miles is "at most 25% higher", neither of which is "12 = 35". Using their approach, I calculated 35k to be equivalent to 15625 specifically, again, not 12k.

If the underlying approach is wrong, we should replace it with something better.

Alternatively, the OTHER reasoning of "the rich should pay more" still applies, so I assume that's a factor here. Hoping States charge rich people (or high income earners, if you prefer) less isn't likely to work right now.

> Alternatively, the OTHER reasoning of "the rich should pay more" still applies, so I assume that's a factor here.

Once again, your assumption is incorrect. That base model F-150 that pays half the taxes costs more than my EV. The registration fee doesn't factor in income or valuation at all. A $100k Hummer EV pays the same as a $15k used Bolt. Meanwhile that Hummer EV is going to do a hell of a lot more damage to the roads than the Bolt.

It probably has more to do with the government being in the pocket of oil interests and acts accordingly.

I don't agree with your base assumption here.

12-15k miles in a Ford SuperDuty is equivalent to how far in a gas Civic? I suspect that driver isn't being charged accordingly.

Registration fees are likely the same or close but when you factor in gas taxes (the original comparison here), the Ford is definitely paying more both based on fuel type and mpg.

More, sure. But not remotely proportional to the increased wear and tear from vehicle weight.

Possible. How far off is it?

Pretty far?

According to your link, an EV that is 700lb heavier => 2.24x damage

Civic: ~2900lb SuperDuty: ~5700-7600lb

What is the difference in taxes paid for an equivalent amount of damage?

I understand the point you're trying to make - and you may be right - but you're leaving out the math to demonstrate it.

Civic fuel economy is about 2x an unloaded SuperDuty, so the SuperDuty owner likely pays maybe a bit more than 2x in gas tax + registration.

+700lb (+25%) => 2.25x damage +2800lb (+100%) => ???x damage

Your story doesn't provide a formula, but seems obvious it is much, much greater than 2 - this isn't a linear relationship

And that's the very lightest SuperDuty model, unloaded.

Excellent, much more useful.

Not sure where you are but in Indiana, gas tax for unleaded is 36c while diesel is 62c so on a per-gallon basis, that's an additional +72% in taxes. Back of the envelope: Civic at 30mpg pays 1.2c/mile vs SuperDuty at 15mpg pays 4.13c/mile so the multiple is closer to 3.4 vs 2

So yes - assuming registration fees are comparable and mileage is comparable - the SuperDuty should pay more.

The lightest SuperDuty has a gas engine. Diesel SuperDuty fuel economy is a bit better, but the vehicle also weighs more and is likely to be carrying/pulling more. But regardless of whether the multiple is 2 or 3.4 or somewhere in between, it is a small fraction of the added road wear.

By the fourth power law, an unloaded diesel Superduty creates ~22x the road wear of a honda civic. Loaded can be 100x more.

> casue a disproportionate amount of wear & tear on the roads vs ICE vehicles

If it was, it would be based on vehicle weight and distance driven. Where I am, at least, it's simply a tax on efficiency.

it's pretty silly to have a tax that incentivizes the opposite behaviour to what you want. registration surcharges benefit the people who drive the most, at the expense of the people who drive the least.

if you're trying to pay for wear and tear on the roads, or reduce congestion, making people feel like they have to "get their moneys worth" on the registration surcharge really isn't helping.

Most states include higher tag fees for EVs. I pay way more in the EV fee than I would have paid in gas taxes considering I don’t drive that much. Trucks and other heavy users dwarf car traffic by far though, and those extra logistic costs (if charged by weight) would show up as increased cost of goods.

The UK is creating a new pay-per-mile EV duty from 2028 to fix this.

How are they gathering data about how much you drive?

Apparently there is a yearly car check during which the odometer can be read, and there are other options like entering the data yourself, but the legislation is not yet completely finalised.

I'm not sure that use taxes really support road maintenance, at least in my state. The reason is that money is fungible, and the income from use taxes can be offset by a reduction in support from the general fund.

> Heavier users of the road ways end up contributing more to the maintenance of the public good.

Heavier users aren't causing the damage though. Heavy vehicles like busses and semi's cause the most damage.

But the economics of collecting them suck. A tax is a lot easier and much less "enshittifying" the daily experience.

But a tax is not targeted to where the usage occurs. Tolls allowed highways with more usage to get more revenue to save up for the more frequent maintenance.

Yeah nice in theory but the reality is far from this.

In order to implement tolls, you need several components involving middlemen. This includes frontend software, backend, payment processing, transponder management, all the hardware involved, support staff, sometimes toll station staff, among other things.

These toll companies are often owned by foreign companies that are in it for the long haul, offering sweet deals up front then gradually charging more and more with no end in sight, as roads diminish in quality and rest stops fall into disarray.

Toll roads are a scam, a regressive tax on the working class, and downright immoral. We should not limit the mobility of people.

Would American companies treat an average motorist better than foreign companies? Are you insinuating that these good, law-abiding, American companies are COMMUNIST?

I am not insinuating anything.

Road management should be administered by federal and state agencies, including the administration of tolls when they are foolishly utilized. It should not be a for profit venture, it is a mechanism of taxation for public logistics.

It should not be possible to offload management to private orgs outside of very specific subcontracting / purchasing of components.

Instead, often times full road management is given to private orgs. They are not given a robust legal incentive to act in the interests of the road system, and how could they? They are interesting in using the road to maximize their profit, at the loss of everyone needing the road.

What do you mean by “the economics” here? I barely drive but I have a toll transponder, I set it up once and haven’t thought about it since.

I don’t even have a toll transponder, OCR these days is good enough to detect your plate number and charge the linked account.

Don't they charge you more if you do pay-by-plate though? I always see signs that have a price with local ez-pass, a higher price with out-of-state ez-pass, and an even higher price for pay-by-plate.

Ez pass billing is all over the place, each state/authority does whatever it wants.

If you reg a secondary car’s plate to an ezpass account without using the transponder, a lot of states will just think it was a read fail and charge you the regular rate but it depends.

The less honest states (New Jersey, probably others) will charge you a punitive fee (which doubles if you don't pay on time) for not having an EZpass on that vehicle. And then when you call customer support they'll argue with you, until you call on the last day when they finally agree that everything was good and proper.

Yes, bill for plate OCR is typically a lot more expensive in addition to having to logon to a site etc.

25 cents for me. I can get a sticker for $5 sticker that negates that (no transponder I think for Seattle’s first 520 bridge, maybe for carpools?). Oh, supposedly the sticker is a transponder, so I can save 25 cents if I buy a $5 sticker. Even though I don't use the bridge that often, it makes sense to buy.

Ussally if you don't have an account they charge you more. But at least for the systems in my area they'll charge your account wether you have your toll transponder or not (because they OCR your plate and charge the linked account)

In Washington it's just 25 cents higher (if you're registered -- $2 higher if you're not registered) than without a pass. Not a huge deal.

Toll collection used to be much worse in terms of collection efficiency (revenue-cost)--perhaps 50% as I understand it. With all the automated toll booths I assume it's much better today.

Problem is, it’s not a tax. It’s a handout to private companies that take advantage of taxpayers fronting the construction cost in a lot of cases. We had one here paid for by tax payers but then leased to a company for some low dollar amount and they keep most of the money.

It’s just another form of rent seeking.

Now, gov run tolls seem like a good idea in areas where congestion needs to be managed. But also needs to be careful not to be a secret tax on the poor.

Fwiw in the Bay Area I thought it was a private company but turns out it’s government run with Fastrak operated by The Bay Area Transportation Authority (BATA) in partnership with The California Department of Transportation and The California Highway Patrol (not sure why CHP is involved but they probably get some kickback of the revenue stream in exchange for some enforcement).

CHP probably provides accident response services to the roads

They are very regressive unless there are income-based credits, which adds administrative complexity.

Rich people pay the tolls without a second thought. For the poor they are yet another obstacle to trying to make ends meet.

Correct.

Tolls are a regressive tax on the working class. The rich don't even need to use the roads as much because they have other people delivering for them. When they need the road system, the tolls are nothing to them.

The working class, which are generally required to be driving to survive, are left holding the bag for tolls. In places with bad public transit, tolls are just a forced wealth transfer from working class to private firms managing the tolls.

All the statistics I've been able to find point to higher toll road usage among higher income people, not less.

Which may already be a sign of ability to pay? Not that I will argue against the right of US Americans to have a country that gets more and more divided by "class" defined by money, an interesting if not very ethical experiment for sure.

The very well-known in Germany satiric news website "Der Postillion" had an interesting provocative piece just yesterday (German, but auto-translate takes care of that): https://www.der-postillon.com/2023/12/weihnachtsmann-ungerec... -- "Schlimmer Verdacht: Bevorzugt der Weihnachtsmann die Kinder reicher Eltern?" ("A disturbing suspicion: Does Santa Claus favor the children of wealthy parents?")

Being able to get to places by car is one of the most basic needs in the US. I think it leads to cementing the monetary status quo and monetary class affiliation when that becomes even more dependent on how much money one can spend on it. A nicer car being more expensive is fine in that regard, it does not get you from A to B much or any faster than the cheap one. Being able to choose roads or lanes that will take you there much faster is different.

It removes one's personal "hard work" contribution to success if more and more of it is out of your control - after all, how much money you start the game of life with is nothing one has control over. Maybe making that kind of mechanism worse is not the best idea in the long term. Unless we are really aiming for what all the dystopia movies and anime have been showing us.

There are also tons and tons of indirect effects. For example, I would make the claim that wealthy shareholders benefit a lot more from roads than poor people, even when they don't drive, since the companies they own and the entire economy needs them. The poorer people driving to work "paying their share" does not look so clearly justified to me, unless one believes that their salaries are perfect indications of their role in value creation.

> The very well-known in Germany satiric news website "Der Postillion" had an interesting provocative piece just yesterday (German, but auto-translate takes care of that): https://www.der-postillon.com/2023/12/weihnachtsmann-ungerec... -- "Schlimmer Verdacht: Bevorzugt der Weihnachtsmann die Kinder reicher Eltern?" ("A disturbing suspicion: Does Santa Claus favor the children of wealthy parents?")

Canadian stand-up comedian Casually Explained (I don't actually know if he stands up to record his videos) had basically the same joke a few days before them.

It's a joke people have been making for years.

Because the cost is not an issue for higher income people. The poor either sacrifice something else to pay the toll, or they take a (likely longer, slower, or more congested) alternate route to avoid the tolls. This ends up costing them more time, which of course is a fixed quantity per day, so they again end up sacrificing. In a way it's regressive even if they avoid it.

Tolls and public transit fares are regressive.

We have removed all tolls here in Nova Scotia,including for small car ferry's , were not rich or populous,but are building out our infrastructure bit by bit to facilitate ease of transport and the prevention of accidents and traffic jams. The other thing they added are info signs accross the main hyways comming in, giving times for the main transit routes, making it easy to redirect , 45 MIN!, yikes! sounds like coffee and grocerie shopping to me! It has realy made a huge difference getting around the city and has opened up options for travelling rural routes that have ferries.

The people who use something should pay for its upkeep. It doesn't matter if that makes it a "regressive" tax. If you are a daily user of a road, you should pay more for its upkeep than someone who doesn't use the road.

>The people who use something should pay for its upkeep

Why? That doesn’t seem like a good way to run society.

Why should a delivery driver pay the toll for the road to my house, and not me? Why should I be able to exploit flat-rate product pricing like that and skim some money from all customers of the delivery service?

Why should I pay the toll to drive to a friend's house? They're the one getting the benefit out of having easy access to transportation.

What if my taxes pay for all the roads in my town, while the neighboring town chooses to implement tolls instead? Why should I get double-taxed? Prisoner's dilemma and race-to-the-bottom?

Why should I have to deal with having my license plate stolen, and police time wasted (who are paid out of taxes), because of people who don't pay the tolls?

Why stop there? Why should I pay for my own food, given that my employer, friends, and family benefit from me being well nourished?

Delivery driver passes that costs of delivery on to you, so you do pay.

>The people who use something should pay for its upkeep.

Fee-for-service city parks? Public libraries? Fire departments? Sidewalks? What about investing in the "public good"?

Public good? That sounds ripe for disruption. Won’t somebody please think of the shareholders!?

If that's the case, trucking companies should be paying 99.99% of taxes to maintain roads. They are responsible for almost all of the deterioration.

https://www.gao.gov/products/109954

This is a strange argument that leaves out some important considerations. You could easily say that because the rich don’t need to use public transit the fares charged for riding public transit are a regressive tax on the working class that use it. Shouldn’t you also argue against public transportation ride fares enriching the private companies that build turnstiles and ticketing machines?

Edited because I admit original statement below is incorrect.

"You could say they are a flat tax since every driver pays the same per usage. You could even argue it is a progressive tax since richer people use toll roads more. The only way you CAN'T describe a toll is a regressive tax. Words have meaning."

If you read the literature[1], they're regressive - less regressive than sales tax, but still regressive despite being utilized more by higher income drivers.

https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/16892

This is completely incorrect. A flat tax has a constant tax rate, which is why it's often referred to as a "proportional tax." Under a true flat tax system, everyone pays the same percentage of their income.

A toll is absolutely regressive because the burden it imposes is constant, irrespective of income; poorer individuals will pay a proportionally higher percentage of their income than wealthier counterparts. As income increases the "effective rate" asymptotically approaches zero, which is regressive by definition.

Good point, I've edited my comment to clarify that it is incorrect

This is just a general argument against constant prices for everything though. Charging $1/lb for bananas is regressive. Charging $3/gallon for gas is regressive. Charging $10 for a t-shirt is regressive. Etc...

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France

> This is just a general argument against constant prices for everything though.

Maybe EVERYTHING shouldn't BE "constant prices". Maybe where there are practical alternatives to constant pricing, those should be preferred and used.

> Charging $10 for a t-shirt is regressive.

No. Not unless there is only 1 type of t-shirt in the world available. If I'm poor I can go find cheaper t-shirts either less stylish, poorer quality, from a generic brand, from a discount retailer, second-hand (used), packaged in bulk, etc., or maybe wait around for a sale on the t-shirt.

Besides price signals, what other tools are available to communicate local knowledge through an economy? I can’t think of any that are particularly effective

For commodities like that, competition already pushes prices to the zero profit limit. Everyone gets them as cheaply as they can be produced. And for those who can't afford even that we have subsidies.

Yes we broadly deal with that via lower tax bands for lower earners, but the problem is hard to avoid.

The regressiveness issue of tolls is effectively a nitpick compared to the broader more comprehensive issue of how to we create an affordable transportation system for the working class and how do we raise the revenue to fund that through taxes.

The dominant automobile oriented transportation system is very unaffordable and requires high costs of entry. The best thing we can do to make transportation more affordable in general is giving people more options aside from the car. Taxing the wealthy in order to raise revenue for public transportation and active transportation options dominates any sort of regressiveness issues around road tolls and less traffic makes buses more effective.

> The dominant automobile oriented transportation system is very unaffordable and requires high costs of entry.

Wait until you hear about the true costs of transit. A transit ride in a large city is typically MORE expensive than a car ride. Even when you take into account the cost of depreciation, insurance, financing and other related expenses.

The transit ticket price in the US is typically covers just around 15-20% of the _operational_ _cost_ ("farebox recovery rate"). And the capital costs for transit are off the charts. Seattle is going to pay $180B (yes, that's "B" for "billion") for about 20 miles of new lines. And for one mile of subways in Manhattan, you can build 1500 miles of 6-lane freeway.

It's THE real reason we have a failing democracy. Thoughtless social experiments with subsidizing transit have led to distorted housing and job markets. You can't just subsidize one facet of life and hope for it to work.

“Democracy in the US is failing because of the resources invested into public transit” might be the hottest take I’ve read in 2025. Nice.

Yep. Increased over-centralization in the US wouldn't have been possible without transit.

And it's the main reason for polarization. You have large cities (SF, Seattle, Chicago, NYC) that are the centers of economic growth, and you have thousands of small cities that are slowly dying. These large cities and their satellites are growing at an unsustainable rate, even though the _overall_ population is flat.

And then the cities themselves, they have a huge population of low-income workers who can't afford to live there without some form of subsidies. It started with transit, but now the freaking NYC mayor is talking about subsidized grocery stores. This is another source of polarization.

Want to see an even starker example? Look at Japan. Tokyo is in a literal housing price bubble in a country with a _shrinking_ population.

    > Tokyo is in a literal housing price bubble in a country with a _shrinking_ population.

No, this is wrong. (1) There is no housing price bubble in Tokyo. Yes, some very central "ku's" (Shibuya-ku and Minato-ku) are seeing a rise in home prices, but it is nothing ridiculous. It is no where near a repeat of the late 1980s. You can easily select a neighborhood just ten minutes away and it will have sharply lower prices. Also, Japan effectively has zero NIMBYism due to a national building code. New housing is constantly being built in Tokyo. (2) Yes, overall, the population is shrinking in Japan. However, the population of Tokyo continues to rise.

Really? Like, really? Here's the graph: https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/asia/japan/home-price-tr...

> Also, Japan effectively has zero NIMBYism due to a national building code. New housing is constantly being built in Tokyo.

Yup. It's a great example of why "just build more" leads only to misery.

> Yes, overall, the population is shrinking in Japan. However, the population of Tokyo continues to rise.

Thank you for making my point.

Must be why European democracy is in shambles then: it's the damn trains and buses! Who woulda thunk?

Yes. Exactly.

I suggest looking at Germany and the rapid ascendance of the AFD. And then looking at real estate prices in Berlin.

Do you have any source for these numbers & the equivalent for auto travel? Would be interested to see - I’m generally aware of the cost vs. fare side of subways, but haven’t seen numbers that support individual car travel being cheaper when you account for subsidies there.

Also worth noting that comparing capital costs of underground transit to above ground private travel is pretty apples and oranges. Buses would be fairer comparison IMO.

> Do you have any source for these numbers & the equivalent for auto travel?

There are several ways you can look at it. The easiest way is to divide the opex budget by the ridership. E.g. MTA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Transportation_Au... ) had a $19B budget in 2023 for 1.15B rides, resulting in about $16 per ride. Assuming conservatively 60 rides a month, that's $960 a month for transit in NYC. Without any capital expenses taken into account.

The average total car cost in the US in 2023 was around $1000 a month ( https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-it-cost-to-own-a... ). And this includes _everything_, including the capital cost.

> Also worth noting that comparing capital costs of underground transit to above ground private travel is pretty apples and oranges. Buses would be fairer comparison IMO.

Buses don't scale for large cities.

This is interesting analysis. However, the MTA is much more than the New York City subway (and Staten Island railroad) that serves the five boroughs of New York City. The LIRR (Long Island Railroad) is an enormous commuter rail system that serves a huge geographical area (probably the largest in North America).

>Wait until you hear about the true costs of transit. A transit ride in a large city is typically MORE expensive than a car ride. Even when you take into account the cost of depreciation, insurance, financing and other related expenses.

Meanwhile, we're barreling toward 2-3 C of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100. Oh, sorry, that doesn't have a line item on the toll receipt, silly me.

>It's THE real reason we have a failing democracy. Thoughtless social experiments with subsidizing transit have led to distorted housing and job markets. You can't just subsidize one facet of life and hope for it to work.

Lol. Lmao, even.

> Oh, sorry, that doesn't have a line item on the toll receipt, silly me.

Money is a pretty good proxy for CO2. So the carbon footprint of large cities is unsustainable.

The most eco-friendly model? Low-density semi-rural areas, with EV-based infrastructure, with sane-sized cars (not SUVs).

No the most eco (and financially) friendly model is high density areas where you can walk and bike to school and work. The transportation costs under this model are effectively nil.

Do either of you have citations?

I can see it being both ways.

Land aside, building a single story house is much cheaper per sq ft than a tower.

Medium density streets, like UK terraces can have enough density to support commerce nearby etc. but also low enough density to use a lot of solar to power houses directly.

Land may be the constraint given the population of the world.

I'm essentially parroting the (settled and not at all controversial) consensus view of the urban design profession so there's no real end of citation.

Though there are few clear cut real world examples to point to because land use is one of the most highly politicized things and it is rarely exposed to real market forces.

It's a great thing to have arguments about because whenever you can point some examples, people will always nitpick at why it's not real (eg. Tokyo is affordable and dense thanks to low regulation and the market, but people will point at the relatively poor Japanese economy etc).

But from basic geometric principles it makes sense that automobile oriented infrastructure is ultimately unsustainable and more expensive because of the constraints of the real world.

Ultimately the issue one runs into is that a car is a box several feet wide by several feet long (6.7x17.4) for an F150. That's a lot of space both parked and on the road. So if everyone buys one (and largely drives around themselves) it's clear that one quickly fills up the size of the road. The cost of expanding roads is very expensive, disruptive, and occasionally impossible. And then it doesn't even really work in remarkably improving traffic because due to Induced Demand, it reprices driving cheaper, which encourages more people to drive, which refills the road again. Everyone's time is being wasted sitting in these large boxes that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

So the core problem is that cars are enormously space inefficient. The system simply doesn't scale and eventually reaches break down.

You simply have to give up and can't grow the city any further. So you have to push people out to other cities.

But if we think of moving people instead of cars, there's a lot more space efficient opportunities since people are very small.

So you look at things like a bicycle, whose costs are relatively near nil, a protected bike lane that is also effectively near nil (put some jersey barriers on an existing road) and you can move that same person for much less. Obviously the problem is that they can't go very far but a combination of different modes for different uses and you have a system that can actually scale.

Build compact mixed use neighbourhoods that one can walk and bike to for local needs, buses for inter neighbourhood, and trains for intra and inter city long distance travel.

Only with this approach can you can continue to scale a city and continue to have a large city that is functional.

> So the core problem is that cars are enormously space inefficient. The system simply doesn't scale and eventually reaches break down.

Houston, TX is the same population as NYC. Except that it has faster commutes and vastly better housing cost (especially on a per sq.ft. basis).

So we KNOW that sanely-designed people-oriented cities like Houston can scale.

Houston is able to scale even with the space inefficiencies of the car by leveraging sprawl. It is remarkably larger than NYC and has room to grow.

This is the relief valve I mentioned here:

> You simply have to give up and can't grow the city any further. So you have to push people out to other cities.

So a city that can sprawl like Houston, does so, and it grows outward, adding more cities on the edge and becomes effectively a loose federation of many cities, which aids in the transportation issue.

That is a solution that some cities on a plain can make use of to kick out the runway further, but it's unavailable to others with more constrained geography.

Nothing I'm saying is actually scientifically controversial. I'm literally citing facts from urbanist textbooks. It's just that the way I'm telling them is unsettling for the people who have never questioned the social-engineered "consensus".

E.g. density doesn't decrease housing prices: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might...

The CO2 footprint question is a tricky one. The vehicle _itself_ is not the main source of pollution. Even if you compare the vehicles, the answer is not straightforward: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint The main source of pollution for transit are _drivers_. E.g. each bus needs around 3 drivers to function, resulting in driver-to-passenger ratio of just around 1:7.

So when computing true CO2 footprint, you need to look at a counter-factual scenario where bus drivers are doing something else. But this becomes extremely tricky extremely fast, as you can move into fantasyland where bus drivers are building CO2 scrubbers instead of driving CO2-emitting vehicles. Or where drivers are working on chopping forests for agricultural lands, resulting in huge CO2 increases.

The next best option is to look at different regions and compare them. E.g. Houston, TX with EVs would have smaller CO2 emissions than the current NYC, with climate corrections.

> E.g. density doesn't decrease housing prices: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might...

The article you cited doesn't support that assertion. Its thesis is that upzoning alone — i.e. relaxing regulations such that it is legal to build higher-density housing, without further interventions — may not be sufficient to create enough vacancies to lower rents.

It says exactly what I'm saying. Density increases do NOT result in lower housing prices.

And you need a state-driven corrupt system of subsidies for socialized housing to make it "affordable". For the right kinds of people.

Did you mistakenly link the wrong article? This one definitely does not say that.

Could you quote a passage that supports your interpretation?

You are right, that particular article alone doesn't spell it out completely. But other articles from this author do: https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/6/15/a-parallel...

The cited article alone simply admits that upzoning won't result in cheaper housing. Because the market is broken (and only socialized housing can fix it), but we must do upzoning anyway.

That article also doesn't support your assertion. For example, they specifically call out parking minimums and minimum lot sizes (both density-lowering regulations) as major drivers of high housing costs.

> No the most eco (and financially) friendly model is high density areas where you can walk and bike to school and work

No, it's not. Because for that to work, you'll need a large underclass that has to waste 2-3 hours a day in commutes and subsist on groceries from state-run stores.

But yeah, the elites will be able to live in nice walkable areas. I know, I lived in an apartment overlooking the Union Square in Manhattan.

Was this an Airbnb you rented for a few days?

Who says "the Union Square?"

No, it was in a friend's apartment that he bought as an investment property. Apparently, the rent in this building is about $30k a month.

The area is great and walkable, with tons of restaurants around. But of course, nobody working in these restaurants can afford to live anywhere close to it.

> Who says "the Union Square?"

What's wrong with that?

> A transit ride in a large city is typically MORE expensive than a car ride. Even when you take into account the cost of depreciation, insurance, financing and other related expenses.

I don't see this. The cost of a month pass on new york subway is $130 a month. That is less than my monthly parking fee in sf

He's saying that's only a fraction of the actual cost of providing your rides for a month. Most of the funding for transit systems comes from appropriations, not fares.

Subsidized transit has legitimately nothing to do with distorted housing costs or labor markets. Housing market is simply supply vs demand. Housing markets like Seattle are incredibly expensive because so many people want to move there, partly because local middle class wages are fairly high.

If you’re saying subsidized transit increases local quality of life, leading to higher demand, sure. But the cost itself has nothing to do with housing prices. Property taxes do not make mortgages more expensive. (Wouldn’t it have the opposite effect, high property taxes making houses harder to afford and therefore decreasing demand?)

Or is it that subsidized road systems don’t work? The pure miles of a system are completely irrelevant. Transit systems are meant for high density areas, costing more but covering less ground. The cost of tunneling under a mile Seattle for a road is absolutely more expensive than building a mile of highway in the middle of nowhere.

What the fuck are you on about re:democracy? “Thoughtless social experiments” are pretty far from the truth there. Democracy gets ruined by political parties unwilling to hold their own members accountable and by allowing corporations to exert more political power than human beings.

> Subsidized transit has legitimately nothing to do with distorted housing costs or labor markets. Housing market is simply supply vs demand. Housing markets like Seattle are incredibly expensive because so many people want to move there, partly because local middle class wages are fairly high.

Well. Look at your two statements again. Now think about this, what would have happened if Seattle didn't have buses and light rail? And didn't permit new dense office space as a result?

> If you’re saying subsidized transit increases local quality of life, leading to higher demand, sure.

It DECREASES the quality of life. It promotes crime and inequality.

> Or is it that subsidized road systems don’t work?

In most states, drivers already pay most of the cost of road maintenance through direct taxes/fees: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... Absolutely no state has unsubsidized transit.

Small correction: there is unsubsidized transit, just not unsubsidized public transit. Seattle has Amazon, Microsoft, snd Google buses judt like the Bay Area does. My wife takes the Amazon bus a lot even though the public transit route would work just as well (for safety/hygiene reasons).

I do think the future green transport is a self driving electric bus ultimately powered by solar with adaptive routes. It is why I dont mind lots of roads being built as they can eventually be repurposed for this.

If you can do self-driving, then why would you bother with buses?

A bus can take 50 people into the city at once. Much more energy and space efficient and cheap. I imagine a bus/minibus/taxi mix though.

> A bus can take 50 people into the city at once.

And a bus will waste the time of 49 people while stopping to load/unload just one person. Mild carpooling (think: a van for 3-5 people) can work.

Longer term, work from home for most jobs will eliminate the need for high-capacity transit. Outside of special use-cases like sports areans.

Yes shared trips of course waste time. For 50 people you dont want 50 stops. But 1 or 2 stops pickups on the way is fine. The algorithm across all this can optimize cost and travel time for each rider. There may be transfers for cheaper prices.

E.g. $5 for a 30 min trip and a change or $20 for a 15 min trip direct taxi experience.

If the road is a bottleneck optimising for usage it may let buses have a fast lane and the difference is less.

Yes, I played around with that using the isochrone API from geoapify. That's why I'm thinking that buses are not necessary.

> If the road is a bottleneck optimising for usage it may let buses have a fast lane and the difference is less.

Ha. The dirty little secret of bus lanes is that they don't work as people think they do. They don't reduce the overall aggregated travel time (the sum of commute time for all the people traveling the route) in most cases. Instead, they force people out of cars by reducing the car throughput.

The commute time for each person who is forced out of their car typically becomes longer. As is commutes for the people in cars that now have to navigate more congested roads.

Or if there are practical, affordable, alternatives.

If there is low cost public transit available, then a toll could be an incentive to use public transit instead of driving. But if there is no other viable transportation option, then it is effectively just a regressive tax.

If you have two lanes and want three lanes, you could build the third as public, or as toll. If you build as public, it comes out of taxes, such as the gas tax. If you don’t have enough public money, perhaps you increase the tax. If you build it as toll, you can bond the construction and pay for it with tolls.

At least in theory, this means the toll lane accomplishes the same total road throughput, but shifts the entire cost of its construction to its users instead of depleting public funds. It then appears regressive, but is arguably progressive.

Well if the government raises more revenue from tolls, they can raise less from other regressive taxes or just redistribute that revenue to lower income brackets.

During covid the IRS sent everyone a check. No reason this also can't work at a state level and just have toll funds sent out as checks to lower income brackets.

This approach is why carbon taxes won't work. Tax carbon, then credit it back to a majority of the population because "they can't afford it". Leaving the people who can afford it to not reduce their carbon use.

Thus entirely defeating the point of taxing it in the first place.

If you want less driving, make it more expensive. Yes, some people will be in unfortunate situations where they can't afford it, but that's the point.

i think it is funny how this critique only comes out to play when people dislike a thing for other reasons but want to project a high-minded concern for the poor.

> For the poor they are yet another obstacle to trying to make ends meet

Only if there is no other way for them to get from point A to point B. If there is, it’s a time vs $ value question to the driver and not regressive, nor an “obstacle”—it’s simply a decision.

> Rich people pay the tolls without a second thought

What's the problem with that? It's an opt-in tax. Also if it's without a second thought then i'd suggest the price is a touch too low.

I agree. I don't like toll roads, but I recognize that they only charge me for using them, because my use isn't necessarily good for everybody else.

Gas taxes also work (ignoring electric vehicles), but paying a specific amount for a specific road certainly seems more direct.

Thing is, I suspect the taxing is inefficient. I would guess guessing 1% of it goes to mitigating traffic, pollution and road damage.

I think most people will just be burdened by it.

I think taxes would be a more efficient way of collecting these fees, and ensuring they go to fund mass transit in a way that traffic/pollution/road damage was mitigated directly and the people were still served.

it would be efficient even if they just burned the revenue immediately upon receiving it.

Like all "economically sound" ideas, people fuck it up. To the drivers, its one more reminder of a government taxing you on a day to day basis, locking up the roads taxes paid for, for another series of taxes.

Chicago is the poster child here. Constant rate hikes. Diverted funds meant to maintain the roads going elsewhere. "Temporary" tolls that become "permanent", etc.

It's bad, stop the madness.

100%. All of this.

With a side of handing off management and a slice of the revenue to private entities. With minimum revenue guarantees that then act as a disincentive to improving nearby roadways.

They're a prime sign of broken economics.

The people who can least afford to move closer to their jobs are the ones who are regressively taxed in time, energy, and money the most.

A proper solution would be to require more housing NEAR the jobs to make it easier for people to save time and money by moving closer.

Why don’t we create the housing at the jobs then?

Require housing in certain places? Now that's what I'd call broken economics. If there is such a need for housing near job centers...why wouldn't that automatically create the incentive to build it? (Hint: It does; the problem is that in most places there are "requirements" that make it nearly impossible to build new housing. Texas is notable in that it lacks the worst extremes of this problem, hence the recent trends in rent in Austin).

Nah. Roads, specifically giant limited access highways through urban cities cost lots money to build. it makes perfect sense for them to be funded by user fees. Urban land is at a premium, if you want to utilize it you have to pay for it. Mass transit is a much more space efficient way to move people in urban environments, and encourages people to walk more in their daily life which has tons of health benefits. Also transit really help urban air quality (even electric cars cause air quality issues because of the rubber tires)

You speak of an already dense place laid out like New York City, or maybe Japan. Where there are regions that HAVE density and typically a matched civic infrastructure.

I am speaking of most of America, where that is NOT happening because densification of areas is blocked by those already nearby who like the way suburbs near jobs are. (I don't blame them, apartments and probably condos SUCK, the building codes don't protect me from the choices of those nearby so everyone suffers the most annoyance.)

In effect, I am encouraging at least some of those nearby areas to experience zoning upgrades. Like in a city simulator when low density residential gets replaced with high, and mid and high rises replace older single family homes and suburbs.

Sure, if one must drive on a road.

Pervasive tolling is surveillance-of-movement in disguise.

Why would they need tolls for that? They have your phone location, they have you on number plate readers which don’t require tolls.

Each of these things is a contributor.

Meh, after housing now yet another resource only available to the rich?

I think rationing is more fair and the only way to prevent massive outrage until maybe we have reduced the wealth gap to a large degree.

congestion pricing is good. we can raise taxes, but the existence of billionaires is not a good reason to refuse adoption of obviously net-good policy.

That's only if you completely ignore all the positives. More efficient economy, more citizen capabilities, better access for emergency and maintenance equipment.

It's so clearly a net win for society and humanity to have open and available roads.

Aside from that if you want to tax me then just charge me more for a license plate. Don't stop me in the middle of driving to hustle me for a buck and some change. Utterly ridiculous management of the problem.

Meanwhile... private jets exist...

congestion pricing is pretty unequivocally an economic good.

> More efficient economy, more citizen capabilities, better access for emergency and maintenance equipment.

congestion pricing literally improves every single one of those.

I took a transportation engineering class a while back and one bit of knowledge that stuck with me is tolls are the only effective traffic relief mechanisms for a roadway. Other mechanisms like adding lanes just invite more cars and traffic is not relieved. I never checked whether this was true, but sounded reasonable.

Adding lanes may not cut congestion in the long term, but it can increase throughput and overall utility by moving more people and goods.

I don't doubt it. It is quite a while ago so I don't fully recall the talk that my professor gave, but I don't believe he intended to mean adding lanes was useless, just that they didn't help with congestion of the particular roadway

If adding lanes doesn't help you didn't add enough. People live in a city to do things and you need to enable that by preventing congestion.

i don't know how to afford the 50 more lanes that most cities need though. I suggest better transit.

Removing parts of the city to add more lanes will also help decreasing demand - it's a win-win!

Each additional lane has less and less impact because of lane switching. Ultimately, you can still only enter or exit on the left or right, regardless of if you have 100 lanes. And having people move across 100 lanes to exit is much slower than moving across one or two.

But you run into the risk that people don't use your new expensive toll road and you're left with a big pile of debt...

That is the problem with them in the Netherlands. Building and maintaining roads is so frighteningly expensive that you can't price them to even cover the cost!

I think perhaps my professor was talking about adding tolls explicitly as a traffic congestion relief mechanism rather than a way to recoup cost of maintaining the roadway

So you mean if we dont socialize the up-front cost plus the ongoing externalities, roads aren't economically sensible choice? That seems less like a problem and more like the beginning of a nice reflection...

No form of transportation would be at that point

It’s just supply and demand.

Of course just creating more supply when the cost to the consumer is basically 0 will just juice the demand to fit the new capacity. Tale as old as time.

Have you considered fuel rationing?

    > Other mechanisms like adding lanes just invite more cars and traffic is not relieved.

I have been seeing this argument for 30 years, and, yet, rich cities in the US (and Canada) continue to add more lanes. My guess: It is just so politically positive to build more lanes that politicians continue to approve them. Why doesn't this happen as much in other rich countries?

Former transportation engineering prof here. This is exactly right. And for many transportation engineers, it's a reason to support toll lanes and to oppose adding (other) lanes. But I agree with some of the other commenters here, that adding lanes supports greater movement of people and goods and, separately, that toll lanes are regressive and come with plenty of (other) issues that are often ignored. My personal take on this is that toll lanes and congestion charging are the most effective methods we know for relieving congestion BUT that they are an incredibly difficult sell politically and maybe for good reason; maybe their issue are worse than the congestion they mitigate.

Thank you for your perspective. May I ask why you don’t still teach? I have always been fascinated by the idea of being a professor but never had the dedication to get a phd

I had a 3 year appointment overseas and could only get similar offers for my next job and only in places I didn't really want to live. Also my father was a professor and, to be honest, it was hard not to notice how much worse the job had gotten. Started to seem like twice the work for 10 or 20 percent of the salary and impact, as compared to tech. Also I was starting to have misgivings about transportation engineering as a field. So I guess just a lot. But I do miss the freedom to research what I thought was important. And teaching too. Honestly, academic jobs are more appealing to me now, in terms of lifestyle fit, than they were previously. I still apply for academic jobs occasionally but lately haven't gotten close to getting one. Don't get me started on the academic job market or application process. Ha!

Traditional taxes are democratic -- if the legislature raises a tax, they can be voted out.

Creative revenue approaches sound efficient, but you don't want efficiency with spending. Efficiency means that spending will grow unabated.

In my state they've had record revenue for 12 years (until just lately). Regardless of each record, they continued to outspend revenue into a deficit.

Commercial enterprises are bounded by revenue (and debt). Public agencies used to have a feedback loop (losing the next election), but in many states there is little consequence for deficit spending.

Don't give spendthrifts more ways to spend money. They will always exceed the revenue they generate.

On the other hand, private companies have no accountability to the public whatsoever, and as long as their grift is revenue positive they can exist forever regardless of how damaging they are to the lives of everyone around them. Private prisons and toll road companies are great examples of parasitic private companies that absolutely must not be allowed to exist.

I agree that may occur, though we likely disagree on how representative it is.

Regardless, 2 wrongs don’t make a right. Moreover, most of the public spending goes into what you would likely consider to be grifter enterprises.

I don't necessarily see this as a bad trend. Eventually a tax on mileage and weight would make the most sense vs the current attempts to use fuel taxes as a proxy for those things.

Why do we need public funds to build a private authority that pays people absurd amounts of money who don't actually do anything instead of just you know.... building the road like we always have. For the public.

If we're going to spend the money anyways why do we need private profits?

Furthermore, just tax the vehicles that are actually doing damage to the roads. i.e., trucks.

A honda civic barely does anything to a road. Where a semi-truck is EXPONENTIALLY more damaging.

The civic barely does anything to a road, except require its existence and maintenance, and it turns out that roads are expensive to build and maintain (even if only damaged by weather).

A highway is not a public good. It is a publicly subsidized good for private consumption.

Can I use the highway if I don’t have a car? (Barely)

Can I use it for anything non driving related (like a downtown street where lanes can be repurposed for outdoor seating)? No

I agree with you on what does the majority of the damage.

I don't understand, there are plenty of other things the public pays for that you can't use for other, unintended purposes. You can't fly your hobby drone out of a public airport just because you want.

Apparently under your definition of a public good, there's no such thing.

> Can I use the highway if I don’t have a car?

Can I use the schools if I don't have a child?

I'd argue there should be some access to school facilities by the public if you want to call them "public". Otherwise it's about as public as the police department.

In the U.S. you can definitely use school facilities after hours (such as the fields, and even some buildings, etc).

The primary concern with not allowing access at any time of day to the general public is of course, the children.

I'm not aware of any public schools in my area that would allow me to, e.g., use the basketball court or soccer field after school hours or on the weekends.

Have you tried? I've certainly been able to. And I'm definitely not alone in having used those facilities. I've used them personally and for ad-hoc sport events (lacrosse isn't exactly popular in the area I'm in right now).

Not recently, though I have observed locked doors and gates that make it pretty difficult to use. If your caveat is you need to call ahead to organize an event that's a pretty different use-case from what I'd like to do, which is to use them very casually and occasionally.

I've never called ahead or anything like that. There are a fair amount of people using them on the weekends, as far as I've seen.

There is one school that definitely is gated off, but that's because it's near a major point of interest and I can only assume they're worried about non-community members damaging the property.

That probably says more about the area you live in than the public schools.

Around here the grounds are not only open outside of school hours, but explicitly so (they have closing hours posted: 9PM).

> you can definitely use school facilities after hours

Aside from a few things like some playgrounds shared with public parks next door this has often been pretty untrue. I've definitely had police escort me off school basketball courts when school isn't in session, the natatoriums haven't had much public access, it's not like the school libraries are open after hours, etc.

I'm sure some places are more open and some are less open, I wouldn't say you can "definitely" use them.

Necessary public infrastructure that is paid for with tax dollars is not a public good?

And just in case this fact is being lost / forgotten: Toll roads are primarily, originally funded through tax dollars but are disingenuously structured in a way these bozos can go "see, it's not actually tax dollars" (it is). The same exact dollars that should be used to build fully public, free roads are instead used to privatize public infrastructure.

There has never been a time where a toll raid has failed and the losses were treated as private. The bonds magically get repaid (to the right people, of course).

It's all tax dollars in the end, one way or another.

> Toll roads are primarily, originally funded through tax dollars

This is untrue of all the toll roads I've regularly driven in multiple cities in the US. Their construction was funded through bonds which are paid back from the toll revenues.

why did you ignore my other statements that expressly address this "viewpoint."

The bonds are issued either by the authority itself or some other agency expressly delegated to issue those bonds.

The accounting is done EXPRESSLY with the knowledge of the states general fund, even though there's a "wink wink" don't use the tax dollars to """directly""" pay for these bonds.

Don't believe me? Look at the financial reports yourself.

There is zero point in the fuzzy accounting other than to make something that simply should be public, private, and allow grifters to make a buck or two off it.

In EVERY CASE of a failed toll road the major bond holders have all been made whole through the state directly or indirectly.

If you have the money, investing in a toll road is the easiest way to make lots of money with 0 risk.

But you can only do that if the entity issues those bonds "knows" and "selects" you. :)

> Look at the financial reports yourself

I have for the toll roads I drive on. It shows the debt payments being paid by the toll revenues, not other state taxes.

> In EVERY CASE of a failed toll road the major bond holders have all been made whole through the state directly or indirectly.

Sure, the toll agencies are ultimately a creature of the state but it's incorrect (a lie?) to argue it's funded primarily, originally through tax dollars, at least for the toll roads I drive on. What's the rate of these failures? What's the actual percentage of these bonds being paid by toll revenues versus failing and the states being on the hook? Once again you said it's primarily and originally. Being paid because the bond failed to be paid back by toll revenues isn't the original payment plan, and unless it's happening most of the time it's not the primary way of those bonds being paid.

> make something that simply should be public, private

The toll roads I'm talking about are public.

> address this "viewpoint."

This "viewpoint" is otherwise known as "reality".

>I have for the toll roads I drive on.

Link me so I can draw some circles for you.

> to argue it's funded primarily, originally through tax dollars

Do you know how bonds work? It's an isomorphic operation. A state entity is issuing bonds out to creditors. A lot of those major creditors will also be secured creditors.

It's the same thing, just covered under a sleight of hand trick.

So the state borrows money from a select few major creditors but it's "wink wink" not against the full faith and credit of the state, then regulates a consumption tax on the road, and the investors and authority get a slice of the pie.

For what purpose?

And when the toll roads fail either the creditors are paid out either through the state out right buying the road or allowing the debt to be a tax write off over X amount of time.

>This "viewpoint" is otherwise known as "reality".

This American brainworm is exhausting, ngl. Buddy you're getting bamboozled by a few vocab words and a 3 step accounting trick, please don't presume to talk to anyone about reality.

> Link me so I can draw some circles for you.

https://www.ntta.org/sites/default/files/2025-06/06-27-2025_...

> then regulates a consumption tax on the road

Yeah, the toll. One assumes you're not talking about the toll but other tax revenues when you're complaining about tax payers paying for the road. Obviously the tolls go to pay for the toll road, so what's the point otherwise about talking about the taxpayers paying for it?

Buddy it's really exhausting ngl having people always assume every toll organization is a private enterprise. It's not just a 3 step accounting trick, please don't presume you know how every toll arrangement is made.

And if your point is the idea of government bonds going to private investors, well, how do you think the freeways are financed? How does it make a difference then if it's a freeway or a toll road or a library or a playground? It's all financed in largely the same way. Government bonds issues to selected investors.

You didn't link me to the thing that we are discussing. You linked me to a current financial report, that of course just lists the tolls.

Do you understand how bonds are issued?

But, since you're seemingly in Texas and are completely unaware of a vibrant example of the type of outcomes I'm discussing, here's one right in your home state from 2017.

https://austincountynewsonline.com/texans-angered-sh-130-ban...

>According to the terms that emerged from bankruptcy court, all of the private entity’s $1.4 billion debt was wiped away, leaving federal taxpayers left holding the bag for the $430 million federally-backed Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) loan given to the private entities.

>Some are asking why the state of Texas didn’t step in and insist the public interest was protected and defended in bankruptcy court. Taxpayers have a right to know why they didn’t get the road back, why their $430 million federal TIFIA loan was wiped out, and why they have to continue paying tolls for another 45 years to use a road that’s lost $1.2 billion of its $1.4 billion original value. The state also had a revenue sharing agreement with the previous owners, Cintra-Zachry. Will the state ever see any of that promised toll revenue?

Would you care to explain that in the course of this discussion, why that very recent and very vibrant example of the exact thing being discussed did not resonant with you?

I mean you clearly implied that you've read these financial reports before, so it raises lots of questions about your motivations and I dare say, honesty.

EDIT: Here's another one! https://trb.bank/case-study/north-texas-tollway-authority/

lmao

"Public good" is a term of art in economics which means a good is both non-excludable (it is impractical to control who benefits from it) and non-rivalrous (one person benefiting does not prevent others from also benefiting).

Roads are clearly rivalrous and while it's often impractical to prevent non-payers from entering a toll road, one can certainly record them and met penalties after the fact to discourage it.

So no, roads are not a public good.

If roads are "rivalrous" then so is literally everything else.

Roads are rivalrous because too many people using them causes a traffic jam. Seriously go read the Wikipedia article on the subject.

Parks, stadiums, etc famously have infinite capacity.

> roads are not a public good

You’re both right. Roads can be an impure public good.

At low traffic loading, they are not rivalrous and can be modelled as a public good. At high traffic loading they become rivalrous and thus closer to a common-pool resource.

If roads are made excludable, they resemble a club or even private group.

The US interstates move military equipment across the country without needing to deal with railroad bottlenecks. It is a public good. Just like GPS, it has ancillary civic functions but it still serves its original purpose.

I mean, that's the de jure purpose, but that's really a nonsensical point to make here. We're not talking about one controlled access route with two lanes in both directions to move tanks around.

We're talking about 10 lane monstrosities, with 8 or more flyovers, standing 20 stories high in places like in Houston and Dallas.

>A highway is not a public good. It is a publicly subsidized good for private consumption.

So is every park. What's the point of this language game?

The means of collection and treatment of it as something other than tax revenue are problematic for sure. Those should be solvable problems, though.

Your point about semi-truck damage vs lighter vehicles is exactly why I think moving in that direction is so useful. The most fair taxation would accurately take both that aspect and actual miles driven into account.

Except the impact of even gas prices going up has added to costs in basically anything delivered by truck. Every tax you put on that just eventually ends up in consumer hands.

> A honda civic barely does anything to a road. Where a semi-truck is EXPONENTIALLY more damaging.

Similarly, a Honda Civic is ~360 million times more damaging to the road than a bicycle, according to the fourth power law.

No reasonable fee structure should let car drivers use roads for free.

And that's before we get into the amount of valuable public land car drivers use for personal storage.

Not literally exponentially, but the damage is proportional to the FOURTH power of the axle load. Imagine how expensive shipping would've become overnight if all these trucks had to pay their fair share and passed the costs to their customers.

Honda Civic weighs 0.7t per axle, or 0.24tttt of wear.

F-150 weighs 0.9t per axle, or 0.65tttt of wear.

A school bus weighs 7.5t per axle, or 3164tttt of wear. That's more than thirteen thousand Honda Civics' worth of road damage. Imagine the driver of the Honda had to pay 1c per mile. The school bus would have to pay $130 per mile. Yes, it's carrying 78 passengers, so the cost would be $1.67 per mile per student, but I think most people would just drive their kids to school.

>Imagine how expensive shipping would've become overnight if all these trucks had to pay their fair share and passed the costs to their customers.

The roads are already being paid for and maintained at their current state. All you'd be doing is making goods slightly more expensive and other taxes slightly less. About 1-4% of your total tax burden goes to the roads. That's a small enough total number to be easily buried among your annual spend on goods.

Like if roads were these huge financial burdens that didn't amortize away to practically nothing.

In australia, big corp donate a few thousand and give cushy "advisory role" jobs to politicians after they leave office in exchange for contracts to build, own and run private toll roads.

It has been proven many times it's cheaper for the government, and therefore tax payers, for the government to get a loan and build public highways themselves. yet, all new highways are private.

big corp get given the land for the roads and have builtin toll price increases. One company raises prices 4% every 6 months. According to google, that means the toll doubles every 9 years.

For me to drive 22km to the CBD via toll roads costs $25 one way, and I save 10 minutes most time of the day. In 10 years time, it will probably be around $40 one way.

big corp make a billion or two in profit every year.

Look to Sydney, Australia, if you want to see where this is heading, as Sydney is completely tied up with toll roads. On the point of them being regressive, the NSW government has been forced to reduce political pressure by capping annual toll expenditure with a government funded rebate system.

It's no coincidence that the companies behind the expansion of US toll roads are mostly the Australian companies that run Sydney's toll roads: Transurban, Macquarie, IFM, ...

Doesn't Sydney also have world class public transport infrastructure? Seems like a pretty decent trade to me.

    > Doesn't Sydney also have world class public transport infrastructure?

I did a double take when I read that. Where did you get that idea? By world class, let's say top 10 or 20 cities. Surely, there are plenty of these cities in East Asia and Europe that are far better than Sydney. I wonder if Mexico City or Sao Paolo has better public transport than Sydney.

Aren't toll roads the norm? It was radical in the 1940s and 1950s to create public freeways.

Toll roads do have real consequences and, do, raise the cost of everything that needs to travel over it. It also means things that could exist on one side of a bridge or tolled section will relocate to other areas to avoid tolls.

Not against them, but I also don't like them. I personally think it's a failure of a state managing its roads where the cost has to become disproporiationally spread.

>Aren't toll roads the norm?

No. I won't say they're rare but they're not especially common in the US.

Do you perhaps live in Florida or Oklahoma? They are quite rare in CA, the southwestern states in general, and the upper midwest.

> "For now, drivers pay to access just 6,300 miles of America’s 160,000 or so miles of highway"

I had a very negative view toward toll roads untill I found the Road Guy Rob youtube channel. His video on the Oklahoma toll roads completely changed my perspective.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EzPPmiKFf5I

https://archive.is/ZvPtX

Aside from money, I think one of the major issues I had with toll booths was... Well the booths. Stopping, having to fish out exact change, planning ahead to make sure you had enough change, etc.

Nowadays we have those boxes that we can put in the windshield that automatically bill us later. And that's made me far more willing to take a trip via the highway. Removes a lot of anxiety. And, so far, at least in my experience, they work.

In the northeast I regularly see idiots slowing down for the high speed toll lanes that have explicit signage not to slow down. People going 65-70MPH, then as the toll approaches one car brakes down to 45MPH because they’re afraid their transponder won’t be read or something.

it would never happen, but ideally toll roads would be dynamically priced such that the average speed is always within 10% of the speed limit. congestion fixed.

earmark this money in a way that can't be siphoned and build public transportation with it. in addition buy fleets of buses with the cash that are exempt and analyze the destinations and origins of the traffic and put them there.

demand for transport is not that elastic though

It's more elastic than you might assume. There's a phenomenon called traffic evaporation, when a major roadway is closed or diminished (even unexpectedly), people adjust their travel behavior such that travel times stay relatively constant.

Los Angeles has many such examples, one recent and well studied one was the closure of the 10 freeway after a fire.

It totally is. Demand can be induced. You can build more highways/roads, you can build more transit options, you can decide how to design roads and handle zoning, affecting how far people go (where are their jobs and stores?), you can decide to build protected bike lanes or build prioritized bus lanes, etc.

All of these factors and more affect demand for transportation.

it’s actually been shocking to me how elastic it is. it frankly pisses me off how much time i spend in traffic behind people who are apparently fully deterred by a mere $1-2 fee. we should absolutely have faster lanes for people who are driving for higher value reasons.

People already driving generally aren't likely to change their destination, and all the traffic headed toward the dynamically priced toll road still needs to be diverted in a way that they will reach wherever they were going.

You aren't going to change congestion unless you fix the balance between throughput and volume. Dynamic pricing doesn't improve throughput, and it doesn't decrease volume- it just forces some of that volume onto less well equipped roads.

why wouldn't it decrease volume? presumably if it starts costing 100 bucks a day people would stop driving and take these hypothetical buses, no? of course as I mentioned I know this would never actually work for political reasons.

Because if it is dynamically priced, people won't know until they already need to go to their destination if the tollway will be affordable.

The volume on the tollway itself may decrease, but only because drivers suddenly need to take other roads that the tollway was designed to alleviate pressure from in the first place.

> People already driving generally aren't likely to change their destination

They are if you price it properly. If it costs $1000 to get on that road, a lot of people are going to find alternative means of transport, carpool, or forgo the trip entirely.

Minnesota experimented with throttling freeway entrances based on congestion, not even charging money, and drivers response was clear: they'd rather sit in traffic.

So let them? I fail to see the problem here.

> it would never happen, but ideally toll roads would be dynamically priced such that the average speed is always within 10% of the speed limit. congestion fixed.

"Good news! Surge pricing is in effect, and today your commute will cost you twice the usual price!"

People who can defer traveling to avoid traffic jams and congestion already tend to do so. Sitting in traffic is boring, stressful, and a waste of time and money. People who don’t have a good reason not to.

A good analogy is a queue. Imagine a society of mostly-identical people. You set up a stand that offers free sandwiches, but you can only give the sandwich to one person a minute. What will happen? A line will form outside your stand, growing longer until the length of the line is such that the discomfort of waiting in line is equal to the pleasure of eating the sandwich. So even though your sandwiches are supposedly free, a cost is still imposed on everyone who wants one, because they have to waste time standing in line.

You're right that people who can defer traveling to avoid traffic jams and congestion already tend to do so. But there are still people at the margin. People who don't value their time or don't mind sitting in traffic listening to the radio or dislike taking the bus. These people are creating congestion, imposting a cost on everyone else, and paying nothing for it. They would do it less if they had to pay. (It's okay for people to drive and sit in traffic, there's just no reason it should be free!) So it would really be more like "Good news! Surge pricing is in effect, and today your commute will cost you twice the usual price but take half as long!"

Buses are great! Road commuting is not much of a thing where I live, so what do I know, but the simplest way to mitigate the problem that poor people can't use a toll road is to put buses on it.

I’ve never been on a public bus and thought, “this is great!”. Crowded, dirty, and almost always there is someone on drugs or experiencing psychosis. I’ll stick to my car.

I've never sat in car traffic and thought it was awesome either. It's a terrible economic drag and it's boring as fuck. There are solutions available.

I've never experienced that on a bus. but when transit is useless only those with no option use it and those tend to be the problems you state. Make transit useful and the problems go away

Well it's either see someone experiencing psychosis, or be at a few orders of magnitude higher risk of dying or being seriously injured.

I often see these comparisons to cars and theyre just so dishonest, because nobody seems to mention the number one downside of driving a lot. Maybe we're desensitized to it. Driving is a fantastic way to die, one of the best.

I have used a lot of public transport in different cities and almost never experienced your problem. Crowded yes, but never unreasonably dirty or with lots of drug-addicts.

> almost always there is someone on drugs or experiencing psychosis

I'd say I've experienced far fewer "what is going on with this person and are they going to end up getting someone injured?" moments on public transportation than in cars.

There are tons of express lanes in my metro (DFW) that are dynamically priced to try and achieve a minimum speed of 55 mph

I didnt realize there are still tollroads that are not dynamically priced?! haven’t seen one in a loooong time

There are toll roads (or lanes) with dynamic pricing attempting to achieve something like this. They exist.

That's terrible and will be gamed to maximize revenue in no time flat.

There’s no more toll booths. It’s a big step function change in viability of toll roads.

Good! Use fees align incentives, reducing the financial burden on non-users. And users pay a modest fee to get better roads than they would otherwise. It's win-win.

What’s spreading is mass surveillance.

Nearly every toll (in NJ or surrounding states) is done via EZ Pass a/o license plate readers.

It’s nearly impossible to travel without being tracked.

It's this. Data is effectively replacing dollars as fiat currency, due in large part to unbridled money printing.

The other factor for me is revenue. From tolls to speeding tickets, it’s all revenue streams. No need to increase formal taxes when you can add revenue via other means.

Data from surveilling toll payers is worth significantly more than the moneys collected from them.

Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can’t the gov do surveillance, profit from it, and charge us for the privilege?

As someone who barely ever drives but still has to pay the same yearly car taxes as everyone else I welcome this. We should be making driving more expensive. It’s deadly, polluting, and traffic wastes so many people’s time.

Walkable cities are a luxury good. Care to share what multiple of the median annual household income a home costs wherever you live? 10x? 20x?

They're more like a compromise.

As an outsider, to me the framing that USA is "car-oriented" was always off the mark. Cars are just a tool, which people would rather use as little as possible (I mean, who actually enjoys sitting in traffic or having a long commute?).

The real issue is the notion that everyone needs crazy amounts of space inside and a yard. I've found this calculator[0] that says that for my family I would need 2280 sq ft to "live comfortably", which to me is an absurd amount, as I live on a third of that and was only ever considering apartments with at maximum half the mentioned square footage.

You can't reasonably organise public transport over such a sparsely populated area. Over here we have districts of detached houses and they're notoriously difficult to get in and out of.

[0] https://themortgagereports.com/117403/average-home-size-in-t...

Gas taxes go down when people use EVs. The government raises the yearly tax for EVs and hybrids, though not based on distance driven (where I am). I can imagine they do it in places with more EVs or where there are more controls like smog tests.

Or, why not put the road tax on tires, which wear based on distance driven? I suppose that might get kind of high if you're paying $0.005 per mile and the tires are supposed to last 50,000 miles for a total of $250 for 4 new tires.

Sydney has an extensive network of toll roads, and it's a nightmare. The state government has outsourced the initial infrastructure development to a private company (Transurban), who pay off their development costs through collecting the toll. It costs taxpayers a fortune. Sydney's road network is so poorly designed that it's difficult to get anywhere without crossing a toll road if you actually value your time. People allege that the state government is deliberately designing bottlenecks into the road network to funnel traffic into toll roads (e.g. westbound traffic on Parramatta Road) and it's difficult to disagree with this assessment. I live in the city and most of my driving is for leisure, yet somehow I still paid $850 in tolls over the last 12 months. Just in case anyone is wondering, there's no 'toll plaza'. Our toll roads have an automated collection system which operates via ALPR.

Suppressing car usage isn’t about punishing individuals; it’s about correcting urban systems that made car dependency the default in the first place. The Lewis–Mogridge position is well established, and making driving less convenient while improving proximity and alternatives is a core principle of sustainable urban planning.

A lifestyle that requires burning large amounts of fuel just to buy groceries, or maintaining water-intensive lawns at scale, only works under very specific economic and environmental conditions. As those conditions disappear, cities have to adapt—even if the cultural shift feels uncomfortable at first.

I'll take my sprawling suburb with a big yard to grow ample food any day over a densely populated and carefully planned cityscape. With the advent of cheaper solar panels and electric vehicles, it's not a big issue.

I don't even give a shit about the yard. Frankly it's a pain in the ass.

It's about getting away from "the wrong kind"[1] of people.

[1]calm down that's not who I'm talking about.

Are you actually growing your own food though? Or is your yard a grass monoculture that serves more of a vanity project than anything useful?

And maybe you are, which, good on you! But I don't think most Americans are.

Yes! I love growing my own food. I have 1/4 acre with 10 fruit trees, 12 grape vines, and a 20×60' vegetable patch.

Taxing only the users of a good or service sounds reasonable

There are many indirect users of roads.

If you rely on businesses, services, emergency workers, etc., you rely on roads.

Toll roads are fine so long as they're flowing. If they're jamming, and I'm still paying, then that fits the definition of a scam.

If the goal is to reduce traffic you can use a highway ramp signal instead.

Not only are they spreading, but existing ones have tolls constantly increased. Some were built with the idea of the toll expiring once the costs of construction were paid off. But instead they just become a new state tax source forever, subsidizing out of control spending.

Paying for the road-time you use, like any shared resource, seems fair to me. It would be nice to see decreases in earned income taxes though.

If the retort to this is it impacts poorer people more, then that is a separate problem fixed by redistributing more cash, so that the wealth gap is smaller.

Edit: to respond to reply about trucks causing more damage to road:

Construction costs are one cost of roads, but another cost is time cost due to congestion (and resulting effects of delays due to congestion). A variable rate toll that also incorporates congestion is the ideal way to manage road use, much like paying more for electricity or other resources at peak demand to modulate demand.

Taxes on gas?

Gas is a different shared resource (e.g. it’s effects on air quality/climate change) than road capacity.

The gas tax is supposedly to pay for roads. Now that they are supposedly paying for the roads via tolls, I guess we can expect that they will not decrease the gas tax but add another tax that supposedly pays for the roads.

There are still all the roads that aren't toll roads that still need that tax revenue to support.

The gas tax has never paid for full road maintenance. It's always been subsidized from other funds.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t seen a big jump in a while, all cars are getting heavier and electrified, and gas mileage is going up.

Odometry tax when you register the vehicle, with tiers based on the curb weight.

Also higher gas taxes for carbon reasons.

Add a mechanism for folks to file for a rebate for distance driven on private roads (an uncle's driveway is roughly a quarter mile, so half a mile six days a week 52 times each year would equal a 156 mile reduction).

The vast majority of damage on the road is caused by vehicles with high axle load, e.g. trucks, especially overloaded trucks. IIRC the damage is proportional to fourth power of the axle load.

As a consequence, personal cars barely register.

It would make sense to collect toll from trucks only, and possibly weigh them all, because overloaded trucks are extra damaging to the road.

If we only had trucks on the road, we’d need less road, right? The street where I live could be about a third of the width if it were not for personal cars.

To carry this further, of maintenance taxes for roads were structured appropriately, trucks would pay so much that it would be prohibitively expensive to ship across the states in Semis. We'd likely see a resurgence of rail transport.

Rhode Island is trying this. The gantries have been up for years, but it was challenged in court by the trucking lobby. The state prevailed with some concessions, and is planning to reinstate the truck tolls soon.

Probably, due to the small size of RI, it will just cause goods not bound directly for RI to divert along I-395 up through CT and MA, and I-290 and I-495 in MA.

> If the retort to this is it impacts poorer people more

We've ended up, though, with a growing wealth gap and more tolls.

Roads cost money, costs are just catching up to reality. If folks are unhappy now when taxes are at historical lows while we accumulate all sorts of off book debt (in this case, “deferred maintenance”), further sadness is ahead. If one does not care to pay for roads, my recommendation is to live somewhere one doesn’t need roads, or the per capita costs are lower due to density (urban areas, broadly speaking), making paying the costs more palatable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund

https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative... (“In 2021, state and local governments spent $206 billion, or 6 percent of direct general spending, on highways and roads. As a share of state and local direct general expenditures, highways and roads were the fifth-largest expenditure in 2021.”)

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-14/unpave-low-tra... (“The U.S. has 4.1 million miles of roads (1.9 million paved, 2.2 million gravel). About 3 million miles of roads have less than 2,000 vehicles a day, less than 15% of all traffic. The paved portion of these low-volume roads ought to be evaluated for their potential to be unpaved.”)

(very similar to how climate costs are causing agriculture and insurance costs to snap to reality, with similar sadness; debts coming due)

We could fund roads (and everything else) using a progressive income tax, so that everyone pays and the wealthiest would pay the largest share.

Not opposed, but to achieve this with the current election cycle cadence will take at least 5 years, if not longer (Congressional cycles). Also, I think Medicare for All is a more pressing use of tax revenue than pouring good money after bad into sprawl infrastructure that will continue to decline in use as rural America hollows out and people keep moving to urban cores. To observe this, overlay predicted rural America population decline with road infrastructure, which you can also use to forecast which road infrastructure we should retreat from maintaining over time.

“Everyone wants civilization but nobody wants to pay taxes” is a hard concept to solve for, most especially when those with nothing or no tax liability (very roughly the bottom 60% of Americans) advocate for the wealthiest from a failed mental model.

I assume automatic tolls via transponders tend to make tolls a lot less transparent in practice.

laughs in New York I-90

Yep. It's great that I have to pay to use this stretch of I-90 and then on top of that if I end up at the wrong rest area on a Sunday I won't be able to access every vendor (because they picked Chick-Fil-A at some locations).

As my grandfather wisely observed: there's no such thing as a temporary tax. I have seen this to be true in my own lifetime, as each and every time a "temporary" tax increase would expire it gets extended.

1. It's gonna get worse before it gets better.

2. Fooled you! It's not getting better.

Every toll system is tied together with glue and is easily defeated by hiding your license plate, which also has the added benefit of making it more difficult to track your movement.

In my region that's just speedrunning getting a fine. The offending vehicle is whisked away at the exit booth by law enforcement.

Good. Cars only exist as a viableeans of transport due to vast subsidies and a total reorganization of society to suit them. Motorists should pay the cost of this absurd status quo.

I would like to see the ratio of toll prices to public transport available for each state properly normalized. Would be interesting to see a correlation.

I recently traveled to Florida. There are toll roads everywhere. Luckily, I got the unlimited daily toll package when I rented my car.

Stuff like this is common in states with no income tax. If public services in two states are equivalent and one has income tax but one doesn’t, the latter state residents pay the same total tax burden through property tax, tolls, and sales tax.

Yep, people really think they've hacked America when they move to states with lower/no income tax. Meanwhile they pay 5-figure property taxes on a house they've paid off until the day they die.

Personal property taxes are deductible in the United States.

capped to a small fraction though so this deduction is really not that much

Very odd, an article about America, but mostly using British spelling except for prices in $.

This is normal for the Economist. I don't really understand why -- they clearly have an American edition (I get their print version in the US and its headlines and organization is totally different than the same edition in the UK), yet they leave all the "colours" and "boffins" in there, when it would be pretty trivial to regionalize the language same as they do the currencies and structure. My assumption is that being a bit eccentric and foreign-seeming is part of their brand.

Perhaps payback for tourists using the word 'dollars' in London :P

Honestly? Good. Puts them on a more even footing with other infrastructure. If trains aren't free neither should highways be.

In the supply-side economic models, regressive taxes are generally understood to contract the economy. Tolls in that model are no different than tariffs.

paid HOV lanes in the bay area are a so enraging. they created a problem by restricting the number of lanes and increasing traffic and offered a monetary solution at the same time by having you pay for the “fast” lane

And Americans still don't get it: cars are not a natural fact of life, a birthright endowment.

Driving a car imposes costs on everyone. It requires public infrastructure, pollutes the environment, endangers lives, etc.

Cars are a private privilege, and toll roads are a way to make people aware of that.

But I wonder how the country that hates socialism will see this privatization of costs.

Do I expect Americans to start thinking of making cities for people instead of cars? Will they begin taking public transportation seriously? No, they won't.

On the East Coast there are more cities with dense populations, so public transit can be effective and car ownership rates are lower.

In the West, many cities are urban sprawls that built out instead of up, so public transit is less effective and car ownership rates are higher.

I wish LA or Phoenix or Vegas was dense living where public transit could be effective, but since they’re urban sprawls and public transit isn’t aa effective as a densely populated city, most people own cars to get around.

Cars require the least amount of public infra and can be run relatively cheaply, allow for free movement.

Contrast this with literally every other type of western public transport project going several times over budget, expensive to use and maintain and breaks down after a decade. I'm all for the idea, but that's the reality.

> Cars require the least amount of public infra and can be run relatively cheaply, allow for free movement.

Source?

> Contrast this with literally every other type of western public transport project going several times over budget, expensive to use and maintain and breaks down after a decade.

Source?

> Cars are a private privilege

People might actually not laugh at this when the government builds public transport, walkable cities, jobs within walk distance etc

Every single lifestyle item of a modern life, whether you have a car or not, depends on the road system.

If you want food, products, or services, you depend on the roads. This means it should be taxed universally and equitably. We should all contribute our fair share to maintain the roads.

Tolls are a regressive tax on low-income people who do the most to make society work, and it is unfortunate that more people do not see this. What's more, they are generally administered by corrupt and inefficient private for-profit orgs. This creates even more overhead which then costs more money.

These orgs generally have slimy deals with city and state governments, while directly profiting from public works that built the road system to begin with.

There are much better ways to fund the road system. Tolls are among the worst.

I don't agree with this perspective. A tax on negative externalities doesn't have to be regressive. It depends on what the tax money is spent on. This is an extreme example, but if you added a congestion tax and then spent the money on a tiny UBI, you might generate $10/person/month, which would be a major uplift to the poorest in our society who don't drive at all. The argument against congestion pricing is further weakened by the fact that those harmed (drivers, pay the tolls) are also those who benefit (drivers, who enjoy less congestion). The ones who are harmed the most are those displaced from driving, who have to find something else to do and don't enjoy the benefits of reduced convention. That's using congestion pricing as an example, but the same argument applies to taxing vehicles in proportion to the wear they impose on roads.

Business owners who pay the tax are free to raise their prices, which is how it's supposed to work. They're currently raising their prices because their drivers waste time in congested traffic and because they pay taxes to the government for road maintenance.

For an analogy, it also makes sense to tax companies who dump their waste in rivers, to the extent that their waste dirties the rivers. If there is some ultra-valuable product that could only be made by dirtying a river (idk, let's say that for some reason insulin had to be made that way), it would be a good that it could still be made, while discouraging people from dirtying rivers for little reason. No one would say "polluting the river should be free because we all use products that are made by polluting rivers." If polluting rivers were free and the government just taxed everyone to clean them up afterwards, we probably all really would use products made by polluting rivers! but that doesn't mean we would be worse off by taxing it directly.

That said, I agree that there's no reason for tolls to fund the road system. Hypothecated taxes are generally not a good idea, despite the fact that they're very intuitively appealing.

Disagree.

While what you're saying does seem like a direct solution (congestion), it is the wrong solution.

The solution to congestion is robust public transit. Full stop.

If a light rail is more comfortable and a faster experience than a car, people will use that instead. Public transit has been traditionally so atrocious, for reasoning we can attribute to many factors, that most people don't use it even if it existed.

If public transit was actually done right, people would be happy to use it. It is more energy efficient, more cost efficient, less of a mental burden, and I believe can be significantly more comfortable.

This is the fundamental issue for me. Society keeps taking these horrible shortcuts that cost all of us instead of just doing the right thing to begin with.

No matter how good public transit is, it will never fully replace the need or desire for cars. Especially now that self-driving cars are hitting the scene. There will be routes poorly served by transit, people hauling stuff that can't be easily taken on a bus or train, people who prefer privacy, stuff being transported by truck, and people who just like road trips. These people are all still imposting a cost on other drivers by driving (when there is congestion). I haven't yet heard a good reason for why that should be free, no matter how good public transit is.

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