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On the Florida Turnpike it was always too expensive for many students when they traveled up and down the state. It was bad enough having captive service statio
by fuzzfactor 4y ago
On the Florida Turnpike it was always too expensive for many students when they traveled up and down the state.
It was bad enough having captive service stations and restaurants for overpriced products, but the toll was and still is ridiculous too, considering it was agreed there would be no toll after the construction was paid for, And it was well paid for decades ago.
Anyway there were only very few exits and they were mostly rural until you got to South Florida where you could get off and on every few miles. The captive service stations needeed to be built at the same time as the Turnpike or everybody would run out of gas back then.
Except Orlando which was a very small city before Disney came in, but their gas stations were still closed late at night and on Sunday.
Tickets were reverse engineered in a completely analog way.
The "main entrance" to the Turnpike coming south was out in the middle of nowhere where the I-75 freeway keeps going to Tampa but you smoothly get over to the main gates of the Turnpike if you want to head down to Miami instead. You would just breeze on through and pick up a ticket at the northernmost gate, and the further you traveled south, the more toll you would have to pay when you got off.
Students would get off of I-75 avoiding the Turnpike and drive on the rural roads about a half-hour until you get to the next Turnpike entrance and pick up a (very valuable) ticket there instead of at the main entrance to the north.
As you got down toward the Palm Beach area, where the northbounders and southbounders still shared the gas stations and restaurants in the central plazas, many northbound travelers would willingly trade tickets from wherever they got on in South Florida for one which will only cost them as much as if they got on at the very last chance before hitting the northernmost exit.
Northbounders would then get off right where they were going to anyway, one exit away from where we got on, and we would get off one exit away from where they got on, and everybody came out ahead, paying the minimum tolls possible.
It took a long time before any toll-takers started looking at the tickets and asking "why did it take 6 hours to only go one exit?"
- reustle 4y agoI used to live in the US and currently live in Japan. We pay around $95 to go about 5 hours on a highway from Tokyo to Kyoto, for example. 3~ hours north is about $35. I think this more accurately charges us drivers for the resources we consume.
- kevinh456 4y agoWhat's the condition of the road like? I assume that it is immaculate.
- reustle 4y agoI also ride motorcycles here. They’re fantastic.
- dandy23 4y agoIt's similar in France, maybe half that number though. It's a good system. The one's who use the highways pay for them. The highways are in a very good state in France.
- VK538FY 4y agoThe relatively high fees on French autoroutes are offset by the good quality, yes. But the principal objection may be the way in which said autoroutes were privatized after being built with public money, no?
- ornornor 4y agoYes but it was long ago and people forgot. But yes, French citizens are paying for the autoroutes twice: built with public money and then again with tolls to use them.
- jonwinstanley 4y agoSure, you may multiple times but they don't just get built once either. There is non-stop maintenance for a road system.
- iso1631 4y agoThere's maintenence in local roads too. And maintence is broadly relative to the damage caused, which is relative to the 4th power of axel weight. A 30 ton truck will cause thousands of times the damage of a 2 ton car, but doesn't pay thousands of times the price.
- Symbiote 4y agoThere was a discussion on a different post pointing out that maintenance of a highway is still very costly. Charging only the users, rather than all taxpayers, appears very fair.
- dmurray 4y agoCharging by road use definitely seems fair, but it's a problem when you have 50 major roads in the state and by historical accident only say 2 of them get tolled. North-South travellers end up subsidising East-West travellers or vice versa. It's hard to come up with a perfectly fair system. Tolling every road is expensive and tax on fuel has its own trade offs.
- sidewndr46 4y agoThe irony of this discussion is we're talking about Florida. A place where absolutely no one really should be living in the first place. The eastern seaboard is just a bunch of infilled swamp, which was more valuable as swamp.
- mnd999 4y agoSuperficially maybe, but it's much more complicated than that. When an efficient public transport exists between two places there are derivative economic benefits all round, a larger pool of employees for businesses in A, more demand for housing in B etc.
- mattigames 4y agoAs much as charging only the victims of crimes to pay for police expenses rather than all taxpayers appears very fair.
- borski 4y agoSo you never get anything delivered on a FedEx or ups truck? And you don’t receive mail?
- gambiting 4y ago
- rhn_mk1 4y ago"Reverse engineering" is where you learn something about how a system works, especially nonpublic information. What you described doesn't have anything nonpublic or learned facts. Instead, it's a cooperation to fool someone into not having to pay for service. I'm not sure if it could even be called "cracking", since that typically involves learning new facts, too. Only "exploiting" comes to mind.
- fuzzfactor 4y agoI'll concede the exploiting but there's always going to be some discrepancy about what a natural-born Florida "Cracker" is to begin with :) And engineering is over exaggerated too, more like the tickets were merely reversed not thoroughly reverse engineered. We certainly weren't going to counterfeit any tickets. Just work around the system.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago"Reversing" without "engineering" only makes sense if you mean that they were turned around on their route :P Otherwise "reversing" doesn't have a standalone meaning that I know that fits here.
- gadders 4y ago>>but the toll was and still is ridiculous too, considering it was agreed there would be no toll after the construction was paid for, And it was well paid for decades ago. Same with the QE2 bridge in the UK. Governments are disgusting. https://www.essexlive.news/news/essex-news/dartford-crossing-isnt-free-like-4712668 https://www.essexlive.news/news/essex-news/dartford-crossing...
- Eisenstein 4y ago> And it was well paid for decades ago. What happens when you build a road and declare it done and then never deal with it again? Does it continue to work as a road after a few years? > Governments are disgusting. Who builds roads?
- andrepd 4y ago>tolls are expensive Well do you know what's expensive? Highways. In the US less than 20c of every dollar come from road tax/fuel tax/tolls. The rest is paid by taxpayers, whether or not they use those roads, whether or not they drive, whether they drive a 3.5 ton SUV or a 1 ton "small" car. This is not even getting into the terrible externalities that car use entails. Personal automobiles pay far too little. >tolls should cease after initial amount is paid A good ballpark is every ~30 years you spend, in maintenance, the same amount of money it took to build it in the first place.
- HyperSane 4y agoToll roads are stupid.