Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

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Because England is very old it has a whole bunch of things which did charge a toll and then that expired, so, nope.

It does also have situations where people go "Hey, this toll bridge was built 50 years ago, surely the tolls should be abolished" and the people who built the bridge are like "Nope. See, here's the press about it 50 years ago saying what a great idea it is to have the tolls be slightly lower but perpetual". Feel free to build a time machine and go tell your past selves that's not a great idea after all.

But well, nothing is forever. In five hundred years that perpetual toll on a road is obsolete because hardly anybody owns a private vehicle so the toll mostly just moves (local) government money from one pile (funding transport) to another (build infrastructure) and it's not a very efficient way to do that. Or the bridge falls down and its replacement doesn't have a toll because people were sick of tolls. Nothing is forever.

In my part of the United States, the state government authorized the construction of toll roads with an agreement that those roads would eventually be handed over to the state government once the projects have been paid off.

That being said, the toll roads keep expanding so that they can continue to be operated by the private company that built them.

This is an arrangement the state government is quite happy with, because they do not have to budget for the maintenance of those roads and they are able to collect taxes on the revenue collected by the toll authority. Converting those toll roads would cause a spike in expenditures and a drop in tax revenue.

Therefore, there is a perverse incentive on both sides to keep the toll roads from being converted into public ones.

I have no idea if this sort of thing was prevalent in the past, especially in the UK. But I wanted to chime in about why several toll roads that were supposed to be paid off thirty years ago are still going strong. I suspect that 500+ years ago “build toll road, hand toll road to the public” was a lot more straightforward.

The River Severn bridges connecting Wales and England were marked toll free in 2018 after 50 years of collecting tolls: https://www.visitmonmouthshire.com/plan-your-visit/how-to-ge...

The Forth Road Bridge stopped having tolls in 2008 and was effectively replaced more recently by a new bridge, the Queensferry Crossing, that has never had tolls.

There are plenty of pubs and houses in the UK called The Old Toll House so I know for sure that some have ended

"Toll House cookies" (chocolate chip cookies) are named after an inn that was named for a tollhouse on an old Massachusetts toll road.

Some folks might consider 500 years "permanent."

Yes, but that doesn't mean we all need to stoop to that level

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