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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

> 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...

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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