5 ms·

10 years ago I never paid a toll except when travelling interstate over long distances. Voyaging through the DC-NY Megalopolis would cost about $15. It now cos

10 years ago I never paid a toll except when travelling interstate over long distances. Voyaging through the DC-NY Megalopolis would cost about $15. It now costs about $70. What's worse, most intra-city travel is or will eventually be pay-per-use. This is already happening in DC and other large US cities, as major throughways are first converted to HOA lanes (2 or three users/auto), and then fully transitioned to completely tolled. Pay up or sit in traffic. For example, within about a 15 mile radius of DC's Beltway, I get charged about $35 / week for my basic commute and one or two trips into the District. This is using only about 8 gallons of gas. Coworkers that must take certain costly routes (on privatized tolls no less) pay easily triple that. Essentially, this is just another 'tax' or wealth transfer between young and old, IMO, that governments have added to cover up the collapsing local financial pyramids.

jdc 11y ago
> collapsing local financial pyramids I don't know what you mean here. Would you unpack this for me?
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  I'm going to take a shot at what hiram112 meant. Lots of things that should've been paid for (pensions, infrastructure) haven't been, because taxes have been too low or the money has been spent elsewhere. The chickens are coming home to roost, as it were, and now the money has to be found. For example, Illinois is broke. Really broke. They don't pay lottery winners over a certain amount now because they're not permitted to without a ratified budget [1]. Yet, they still take lottery ticket revenue in. Pensions are so underfunded, Chicago is looking at raising hundreds of millions of dollars through property taxes [2]. Boomers (in general) enjoyed prosperity by kicking the can, and now younger generations are being expected to pay for it. Sidenote: A separate issue is that automobile owners pay nowhere near what it costs to maintain local and state road infrastructure [3]. Taxes must go up for those users, or people need to move to dense urban areas where public/mass transit can provide for their mobility needs. Iowa is going as far as to letting roads go fallow [4]. [1] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/31/illinois-lottery-winners-receive-iou-amid-lack-of-budget.html http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/31/illinois-lottery-winners-rece... [2] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-rahm-emanuel-property-tax-hike-met-0903-20150902-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-rahm-em... [3] http://www.transportation.gov/highway-trust-fund-ticker http://www.transportation.gov/highway-trust-fund-ticker [4] http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/07/iowa-makes-a-bold-admission-we-need-fewer-roads/398021/ http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/07/iowa-makes-a-bold-adm...
  - selectodude 11y ago
    Ironically, Chicago's road budget is almost entirely funded by yearly fees on automobile owners. It's just everything else that's a mess.
revelation 11y ago
Or, you know, and this seems more Occams razor, these tolls are meant to finance the roads, which have previously been paid for from general taxation. In that sense, we have been transferring money from people who can't afford a car to those that can. And of course we need to factor in the huge externalities from car driving. Charging the cost of the roads doesn't even begin to cover the huge costs incurred through the massive inefficiency that is ferrying single people in multi-ton vehicles from suburban homes into the city core. These aren't even hypothetical climate-change costs, it's money out of the pockets of all the people actually living in the city who pay to accommodate suburbanites by providing free parking and streets on what is insanely valuable land. It is still far, far too cheap to have a car and do the suburban-city commute.
- xyzzy123 11y ago
  However, you will notice the tolls tend to stick around long after the road is paid for.
avn2109 11y ago
>> "What's worse,..." One man's worse is another man's best. This sounds economically optimal to me - the people using the asset (roads) are paying for them, instead of being subsidized by all taxpayers. Also, I suspect that if tolls funded 100% of the all-in road transportation costs for those routes, they would be significantly higher than the numbers you've mentioned here. It sounds like there are still pretty significant subsidies.
imgabe 11y ago
It's not a wealth transfer, it's just internalizing some externalities. The decisions of millions of people to live far away from where they work has created this situation where they all have to spend hours sitting in traffic. Maybe individually it's worthwhile to each person, but collectively it's wasting billions of hours and countless gallons of gas. The tolls are merely trying to align the financial incentives with reality. In other words, move so you don't have to sit in traffic or pay the toll.
- refurb 11y ago
  I think the problem is that such tolls are hitting the lower income class hard. Unless you make a lot of money, you can't live in a city center where you work. You have no choice but to live in the 'burbs where a car is your only option. Think about it this way: raise the tolls to something really high, say $50/day. The very rich won't stop driving, they don't care. So now we convert all of our roads from public to only for the very wealthy.
  - imgabe 11y ago
    People say nobody can afford to live in a city, and yet "inner city" is synonymous with poverty. There are plenty of places to live in most cities that are within the reach of middle class folks, but they might entail living next to some people with a different skin color, and that frightens people. Other alleged problems like crime, bad schools, etc would clear up easily if some people who cared about making a community moved in and took some responsibility, but nobody seems to want to do that.
    - refurb 11y ago
      There are plenty of places to live in most cities that are within the reach of middle class folks, but they might entail living next to some people with a different skin color, and that frightens people. Or living in a neighborhood with gun violence and rampant drug abuse. I don't blame them for not wanting to live there.
      - 11y ago

jdc 11y ago

> collapsing local financial pyramids I don't know what you mean here. Would you unpack this for me?

toomuchtodo 11y ago
I'm going to take a shot at what hiram112 meant. Lots of things that should've been paid for (pensions, infrastructure) haven't been, because taxes have been too low or the money has been spent elsewhere. The chickens are coming home to roost, as it were, and now the money has to be found. For example, Illinois is broke. Really broke. They don't pay lottery winners over a certain amount now because they're not permitted to without a ratified budget [1]. Yet, they still take lottery ticket revenue in. Pensions are so underfunded, Chicago is looking at raising hundreds of millions of dollars through property taxes [2]. Boomers (in general) enjoyed prosperity by kicking the can, and now younger generations are being expected to pay for it. Sidenote: A separate issue is that automobile owners pay nowhere near what it costs to maintain local and state road infrastructure [3]. Taxes must go up for those users, or people need to move to dense urban areas where public/mass transit can provide for their mobility needs. Iowa is going as far as to letting roads go fallow [4]. [1] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/31/illinois-lottery-winners-receive-iou-amid-lack-of-budget.html http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/31/illinois-lottery-winners-rece... [2] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-rahm-emanuel-property-tax-hike-met-0903-20150902-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-rahm-em... [3] http://www.transportation.gov/highway-trust-fund-ticker http://www.transportation.gov/highway-trust-fund-ticker [4] http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/07/iowa-makes-a-bold-admission-we-need-fewer-roads/398021/ http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/07/iowa-makes-a-bold-adm...
- selectodude 11y ago
  Ironically, Chicago's road budget is almost entirely funded by yearly fees on automobile owners. It's just everything else that's a mess.

revelation 11y ago

Or, you know, and this seems more Occams razor, these tolls are meant to finance the roads, which have previously been paid for from general taxation. In that sense, we have been transferring money from people who can't afford a car to those that can. And of course we need to factor in the huge externalities from car driving. Charging the cost of the roads doesn't even begin to cover the huge costs incurred through the massive inefficiency that is ferrying single people in multi-ton vehicles from suburban homes into the city core. These aren't even hypothetical climate-change costs, it's money out of the pockets of all the people actually living in the city who pay to accommodate suburbanites by providing free parking and streets on what is insanely valuable land. It is still far, far too cheap to have a car and do the suburban-city commute.

xyzzy123 11y ago
However, you will notice the tolls tend to stick around long after the road is paid for.

avn2109 11y ago

>> "What's worse,..." One man's worse is another man's best. This sounds economically optimal to me - the people using the asset (roads) are paying for them, instead of being subsidized by all taxpayers. Also, I suspect that if tolls funded 100% of the all-in road transportation costs for those routes, they would be significantly higher than the numbers you've mentioned here. It sounds like there are still pretty significant subsidies.

imgabe 11y ago

It's not a wealth transfer, it's just internalizing some externalities. The decisions of millions of people to live far away from where they work has created this situation where they all have to spend hours sitting in traffic. Maybe individually it's worthwhile to each person, but collectively it's wasting billions of hours and countless gallons of gas. The tolls are merely trying to align the financial incentives with reality. In other words, move so you don't have to sit in traffic or pay the toll.

refurb 11y ago
I think the problem is that such tolls are hitting the lower income class hard. Unless you make a lot of money, you can't live in a city center where you work. You have no choice but to live in the 'burbs where a car is your only option. Think about it this way: raise the tolls to something really high, say $50/day. The very rich won't stop driving, they don't care. So now we convert all of our roads from public to only for the very wealthy.
- imgabe 11y ago
  People say nobody can afford to live in a city, and yet "inner city" is synonymous with poverty. There are plenty of places to live in most cities that are within the reach of middle class folks, but they might entail living next to some people with a different skin color, and that frightens people. Other alleged problems like crime, bad schools, etc would clear up easily if some people who cared about making a community moved in and took some responsibility, but nobody seems to want to do that.
  - refurb 11y ago
    There are plenty of places to live in most cities that are within the reach of middle class folks, but they might entail living next to some people with a different skin color, and that frightens people. Or living in a neighborhood with gun violence and rampant drug abuse. I don't blame them for not wanting to live there.
    - 11y ago