15 ms·

Toll roads are spreading in America

208 points by smurda 10mo ago

SilverElfin 10mo ago
Not only are they spreading, but existing ones have tolls constantly increased. Some were built with the idea of the toll expiring once the costs of construction were paid off. But instead they just become a new state tax source forever, subsidizing out of control spending.
- lotsofpulp 10mo ago
  Paying for the road-time you use, like any shared resource, seems fair to me. It would be nice to see decreases in earned income taxes though. If the retort to this is it impacts poorer people more, then that is a separate problem fixed by redistributing more cash, so that the wealth gap is smaller. Edit: to respond to reply about trucks causing more damage to road: Construction costs are one cost of roads, but another cost is time cost due to congestion (and resulting effects of delays due to congestion). A variable rate toll that also incorporates congestion is the ideal way to manage road use, much like paying more for electricity or other resources at peak demand to modulate demand.
  - morkalork 10mo ago
    Taxes on gas?
    - lotsofpulp 10mo ago
      Gas is a different shared resource (e.g. it’s effects on air quality/climate change) than road capacity.
      - jtbayly 10mo ago
        The gas tax is supposedly to pay for roads. Now that they are supposedly paying for the roads via tolls, I guess we can expect that they will not decrease the gas tax but add another tax that supposedly pays for the roads.
        Arainach 10mo ago
        The gas tax has never paid for full road maintenance. It's always been subsidized from other funds.
        vel0city 10mo ago
        There are still all the roads that aren't toll roads that still need that tax revenue to support.
    - selectodude 10mo ago
      Unfortunately, it hasn’t seen a big jump in a while, all cars are getting heavier and electrified, and gas mileage is going up.
    - redwall_hp 10mo ago
      Odometry tax when you register the vehicle, with tiers based on the curb weight. Also higher gas taxes for carbon reasons.
      - WillAdams 10mo ago
        Add a mechanism for folks to file for a rebate for distance driven on private roads (an uncle's driveway is roughly a quarter mile, so half a mile six days a week 52 times each year would equal a 156 mile reduction).
  - inglor_cz 10mo ago
    The vast majority of damage on the road is caused by vehicles with high axle load, e.g. trucks, especially overloaded trucks. IIRC the damage is proportional to fourth power of the axle load. As a consequence, personal cars barely register. It would make sense to collect toll from trucks only, and possibly weigh them all, because overloaded trucks are extra damaging to the road.
    - dietrichepp 10mo ago
      If we only had trucks on the road, we’d need less road, right? The street where I live could be about a third of the width if it were not for personal cars.
    - DangitBobby 10mo ago
      To carry this further, of maintenance taxes for roads were structured appropriately, trucks would pay so much that it would be prohibitively expensive to ship across the states in Semis. We'd likely see a resurgence of rail transport.
    - floundy 10mo ago
      Rhode Island is trying this. The gantries have been up for years, but it was challenged in court by the trucking lobby. The state prevailed with some concessions, and is planning to reinstate the truck tolls soon. Probably, due to the small size of RI, it will just cause goods not bound directly for RI to divert along I-395 up through CT and MA, and I-290 and I-495 in MA.
  - NegativeK 10mo ago
    > If the retort to this is it impacts poorer people more We've ended up, though, with a growing wealth gap and more tolls.
- toomuchtodo 10mo ago
  Roads cost money, costs are just catching up to reality. If folks are unhappy now when taxes are at historical lows while we accumulate all sorts of off book debt (in this case, “deferred maintenance”), further sadness is ahead. If one does not care to pay for roads, my recommendation is to live somewhere one doesn’t need roads, or the per capita costs are lower due to density (urban areas, broadly speaking), making paying the costs more palatable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/highway-and-road-expenditures https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative... (“In 2021, state and local governments spent $206 billion, or 6 percent of direct general spending, on highways and roads. As a share of state and local direct general expenditures, highways and roads were the fifth-largest expenditure in 2021.”) https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-14/unpave-low-traffic-roads-to-save-energy-and-money/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-14/unpave-low-tra... (“The U.S. has 4.1 million miles of roads (1.9 million paved, 2.2 million gravel). About 3 million miles of roads have less than 2,000 vehicles a day, less than 15% of all traffic. The paved portion of these low-volume roads ought to be evaluated for their potential to be unpaved.”) (very similar to how climate costs are causing agriculture and insurance costs to snap to reality, with similar sadness; debts coming due)
  - fogzen 10mo ago
    We could fund roads (and everything else) using a progressive income tax, so that everyone pays and the wealthiest would pay the largest share.
    - toomuchtodo 10mo ago
      Not opposed, but to achieve this with the current election cycle cadence will take at least 5 years, if not longer (Congressional cycles). Also, I think Medicare for All is a more pressing use of tax revenue than pouring good money after bad into sprawl infrastructure that will continue to decline in use as rural America hollows out and people keep moving to urban cores. To observe this, overlay predicted rural America population decline with road infrastructure, which you can also use to forecast which road infrastructure we should retreat from maintaining over time. “Everyone wants civilization but nobody wants to pay taxes” is a hard concept to solve for, most especially when those with nothing or no tax liability (very roughly the bottom 60% of Americans) advocate for the wealthiest from a failed mental model.
- ghaff 10mo ago
  I assume automatic tolls via transponders tend to make tolls a lot less transparent in practice.
- kotaKat 10mo ago
  laughs in New York I-90 Yep. It's great that I have to pay to use this stretch of I-90 and then on top of that if I end up at the wrong rest area on a Sunday I won't be able to access every vendor (because they picked Chick-Fil-A at some locations).
- bigstrat2003 10mo ago
  As my grandfather wisely observed: there's no such thing as a temporary tax. I have seen this to be true in my own lifetime, as each and every time a "temporary" tax increase would expire it gets extended.
hoppyhoppy2 10mo ago
https://archive.is/ZvPtX https://archive.is/ZvPtX
arjie 10mo ago
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.
- ninalanyon 10mo ago
  Tolls are a regressive tax; they disproportionately affect the poor.
- everforward 10mo ago
  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.
  - spwa4 10mo ago
    > 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.
_ea1k 10mo ago
I don't necessarily see this as a bad trend. Eventually a tax on mileage and weight would make the most sense vs the current attempts to use fuel taxes as a proxy for those things.
- whoknowsidont 10mo ago
  Why do we need public funds to build a private authority that pays people absurd amounts of money who don't actually do anything instead of just you know.... building the road like we always have. For the public. If we're going to spend the money anyways why do we need private profits? Furthermore, just tax the vehicles that are actually doing damage to the roads. i.e., trucks. A honda civic barely does anything to a road. Where a semi-truck is EXPONENTIALLY more damaging.
  - dietrichepp 10mo ago
    The civic barely does anything to a road, except require its existence and maintenance, and it turns out that roads are expensive to build and maintain (even if only damaged by weather).
  - _aavaa_ 10mo ago
    A highway is not a public good. It is a publicly subsidized good for private consumption. Can I use the highway if I don’t have a car? (Barely) Can I use it for anything non driving related (like a downtown street where lanes can be repurposed for outdoor seating)? No I agree with you on what does the majority of the damage.
    - potato3732842 10mo ago
      >A highway is not a public good. It is a publicly subsidized good for private consumption. So is every park. What's the point of this language game?
    - morkalork 10mo ago
      I don't understand, there are plenty of other things the public pays for that you can't use for other, unintended purposes. You can't fly your hobby drone out of a public airport just because you want.
AnotherGoodName 10mo ago
There’s no more toll booths. It’s a big step function change in viability of toll roads.
nfw2 10mo ago
Toll roads are good economics. If a choice has negative externalities (more traffic, more pollution, road damage), tax it.
- kiernanmcgowan 10mo ago
  It’s also a direct usage tax to support road maintenance. Heavier users of the road ways end up contributing more to the maintenance of the public good. We had a proxy for that via gasoline taxes but with EV becoming more common we need to find a replacement for that revenue.
  - haskellandrust 10mo ago
    The gas tax hasn’t kept up with inflation, EVs are only a secondary contributor to the shortfall. Most states have been leeching from their general funds to keep up with highway maintenance. California has raised theres fair aggressively, though.
  - pclmulqdq 10mo ago
    There are several states that have an EV registration surcharge that replaces gas tax. It's not popular with the pro-EV crowd.
    - vel0city 10mo ago
      I'm fine with a decently fair registration tax to offset the gas taxes, but the one in my state is the equivalent of 1,000 gallons of gas for the state gas taxes. If the car was a 35mpg hybrid that would be 35,000mi of equivalent driving. This is incredibly unfair.
      - Loughla 10mo ago
        If I owned an ev for 3 years, the tax means I save money.
        10mo ago
tonymet 10mo ago
Traditional taxes are democratic -- if the legislature raises a tax, they can be voted out. Creative revenue approaches sound efficient, but you don't want efficiency with spending. Efficiency means that spending will grow unabated. In my state they've had record revenue for 12 years (until just lately). Regardless of each record, they continued to outspend revenue into a deficit. Commercial enterprises are bounded by revenue (and debt). Public agencies used to have a feedback loop (losing the next election), but in many states there is little consequence for deficit spending. Don't give spendthrifts more ways to spend money. They will always exceed the revenue they generate.
- DangitBobby 10mo ago
  On the other hand, private companies have no accountability to the public whatsoever, and as long as their grift is revenue positive they can exist forever regardless of how damaging they are to the lives of everyone around them. Private prisons and toll road companies are great examples of parasitic private companies that absolutely must not be allowed to exist.
  - tonymet 10mo ago
    I agree that may occur, though we likely disagree on how representative it is. Regardless, 2 wrongs don’t make a right. Moreover, most of the public spending goes into what you would likely consider to be grifter enterprises.
websiteapi 10mo ago
it would never happen, but ideally toll roads would be dynamically priced such that the average speed is always within 10% of the speed limit. congestion fixed. earmark this money in a way that can't be siphoned and build public transportation with it. in addition buy fleets of buses with the cash that are exempt and analyze the destinations and origins of the traffic and put them there.
- nfw2 10mo ago
  demand for transport is not that elastic though
  - hamdingers 10mo ago
    It's more elastic than you might assume. There's a phenomenon called traffic evaporation, when a major roadway is closed or diminished (even unexpectedly), people adjust their travel behavior such that travel times stay relatively constant. Los Angeles has many such examples, one recent and well studied one was the closure of the 10 freeway after a fire.
  - dangus 10mo ago
    It totally is. Demand can be induced. You can build more highways/roads, you can build more transit options, you can decide how to design roads and handle zoning, affecting how far people go (where are their jobs and stores?), you can decide to build protected bike lanes or build prioritized bus lanes, etc. All of these factors and more affect demand for transportation.
  - whimsicalism 10mo ago
    it’s actually been shocking to me how elastic it is. it frankly pisses me off how much time i spend in traffic behind people who are apparently fully deterred by a mere $1-2 fee. we should absolutely have faster lanes for people who are driving for higher value reasons.
- zdragnar 10mo ago
  People already driving generally aren't likely to change their destination, and all the traffic headed toward the dynamically priced toll road still needs to be diverted in a way that they will reach wherever they were going. You aren't going to change congestion unless you fix the balance between throughput and volume. Dynamic pricing doesn't improve throughput, and it doesn't decrease volume- it just forces some of that volume onto less well equipped roads.
survirtual 10mo ago
Every single lifestyle item of a modern life, whether you have a car or not, depends on the road system. If you want food, products, or services, you depend on the roads. This means it should be taxed universally and equitably. We should all contribute our fair share to maintain the roads. Tolls are a regressive tax on low-income people who do the most to make society work, and it is unfortunate that more people do not see this. What's more, they are generally administered by corrupt and inefficient private for-profit orgs. This creates even more overhead which then costs more money. These orgs generally have slimy deals with city and state governments, while directly profiting from public works that built the road system to begin with. There are much better ways to fund the road system. Tolls are among the worst.
- ChadNauseam 10mo ago
  I don't agree with this perspective. A tax on negative externalities doesn't have to be regressive. It depends on what the tax money is spent on. This is an extreme example, but if you added a congestion tax and then spent the money on a tiny UBI, you might generate $10/person/month, which would be a major uplift to the poorest in our society who don't drive at all. The argument against congestion pricing is further weakened by the fact that those harmed (drivers, pay the tolls) are also those who benefit (drivers, who enjoy less congestion). The ones who are harmed the most are those displaced from driving, who have to find something else to do and don't enjoy the benefits of reduced convention. That's using congestion pricing as an example, but the same argument applies to taxing vehicles in proportion to the wear they impose on roads. Business owners who pay the tax are free to raise their prices, which is how it's supposed to work. They're currently raising their prices because their drivers waste time in congested traffic and because they pay taxes to the government for road maintenance. For an analogy, it also makes sense to tax companies who dump their waste in rivers, to the extent that their waste dirties the rivers. If there is some ultra-valuable product that could only be made by dirtying a river (idk, let's say that for some reason insulin had to be made that way), it would be a good that it could still be made, while discouraging people from dirtying rivers for little reason. No one would say "polluting the river should be free because we all use products that are made by polluting rivers." If polluting rivers were free and the government just taxed everyone to clean them up afterwards, we probably all really would use products made by polluting rivers! but that doesn't mean we would be worse off by taxing it directly. That said, I agree that there's no reason for tolls to fund the road system. Hypothecated taxes are generally not a good idea, despite the fact that they're very intuitively appealing.
jarjoura 10mo ago
Aren't toll roads the norm? It was radical in the 1940s and 1950s to create public freeways. Toll roads do have real consequences and, do, raise the cost of everything that needs to travel over it. It also means things that could exist on one side of a bridge or tolled section will relocate to other areas to avoid tolls. Not against them, but I also don't like them. I personally think it's a failure of a state managing its roads where the cost has to become disproporiationally spread.
- ghaff 10mo ago
  >Aren't toll roads the norm? No. I won't say they're rare but they're not especially common in the US.
- pinkmuffinere 10mo ago
  Do you perhaps live in Florida or Oklahoma? They are quite rare in CA, the southwestern states in general, and the upper midwest.
- Bengalilol 10mo ago
  > "For now, drivers pay to access just 6,300 miles of America’s 160,000 or so miles of highway"
drnick1 10mo ago
Very odd, an article about America, but mostly using British spelling except for prices in $.
- digital-cygnet 10mo ago
  This is normal for the Economist. I don't really understand why -- they clearly have an American edition (I get their print version in the US and its headlines and organization is totally different than the same edition in the UK), yet they leave all the "colours" and "boffins" in there, when it would be pretty trivial to regionalize the language same as they do the currencies and structure. My assumption is that being a bit eccentric and foreign-seeming is part of their brand.
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- hexbin010 10mo ago
  Perhaps payback for tourists using the word 'dollars' in London :P
fortyseven 10mo ago
Aside from money, I think one of the major issues I had with toll booths was... Well the booths. Stopping, having to fish out exact change, planning ahead to make sure you had enough change, etc. Nowadays we have those boxes that we can put in the windshield that automatically bill us later. And that's made me far more willing to take a trip via the highway. Removes a lot of anxiety. And, so far, at least in my experience, they work.
- floundy 10mo ago
  In the northeast I regularly see idiots slowing down for the high speed toll lanes that have explicit signage not to slow down. People going 65-70MPH, then as the toll approaches one car brakes down to 45MPH because they’re afraid their transponder won’t be read or something.
blauditore 10mo ago
Tangential, but: Cars are in part so problematic because they are a means of transportation designed for a handful of people, but mostly used by a single person. All the alternatives are either unpopular to most people (like bikes, or public transport), or obscure (small one-person cars). Especially the US just converged to this impractical de-facto standard in size and shape.
- hamdingers 10mo ago
  The alternatives are impractical due to all the space cars and their infrastructure consume (walking, transit), or due to the danger cars pose (bicycles, motorbikes, small cars). The US has converged because we are trapped in a vicious cycle.
  - underlipton 10mo ago
    The cycle would have broken in 2008 if we hadn't bailed out the auto manufacturers. Pro-free market until the moment it counts.
    - senordevnyc 10mo ago
      Wait, what would that have changed? Are you imagining that we’d have fewer cars in America in 2025 if we hadn’t bailed out the manufacturers in 2008?
      - underlipton 10mo ago
        Obviously it's not instantaneous, and you still have imports wanting to fill the vacuum, but a collapse of the US auto industry means 1) lower replacement rate in the near term as the remainders try to ramp up production, 2) difficulty servicing the legacy fleet, and 3) a massive blow in terms of sentiment and outlook. In this hypothetical, an American institution blew itself up and made a lot of people's lives more difficult. Do you think they earn that trust back easily? Or is it a post-bust clarity moment, where people finally have a moment to think about how much money is poured into their personal cars and auto infrastructure writ large? Because, I mean, we did see something similar to that with the pandemic and a mass shift in perspectives on work culture, which corporations had to fight mightily to hobble. You also saw a similar shift during the Great Depression, and it took banks literal generations to rebuild their reputation with the public. In both cases, you saw massive ramifications for the way in which people lived. I do think that no auto bailouts in 2008 ends America's love affair with the car as we knew it. So, yes, fewer cars. Or maybe, at least, different cars.
ronbenton 10mo ago
I took a transportation engineering class a while back and one bit of knowledge that stuck with me is tolls are the only effective traffic relief mechanisms for a roadway. Other mechanisms like adding lanes just invite more cars and traffic is not relieved. I never checked whether this was true, but sounded reasonable.
- bwhiting2356 10mo ago
  Adding lanes may not cut congestion in the long term, but it can increase throughput and overall utility by moving more people and goods.
  - ronbenton 10mo ago
    I don't doubt it. It is quite a while ago so I don't fully recall the talk that my professor gave, but I don't believe he intended to mean adding lanes was useless, just that they didn't help with congestion of the particular roadway
    - bluGill 10mo ago
      If adding lanes doesn't help you didn't add enough. People live in a city to do things and you need to enable that by preventing congestion. i don't know how to afford the 50 more lanes that most cities need though. I suggest better transit.
      - loglog 10mo ago
        Removing parts of the city to add more lanes will also help decreasing demand - it's a win-win!
  - cmovq 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - ronbenton 10mo ago
shkkmo 10mo ago
I had a very negative view toward toll roads untill I found the Road Guy Rob youtube channel. His video on the Oklahoma toll roads completely changed my perspective. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EzPPmiKFf5I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EzPPmiKFf5I
anorphirith 10mo ago
paid HOV lanes in the bay area are a so enraging. they created a problem by restricting the number of lanes and increasing traffic and offered a monetary solution at the same time by having you pay for the “fast” lane
billy99k 10mo ago
I recently traveled to Florida. There are toll roads everywhere. Luckily, I got the unlimited daily toll package when I rented my car.
- floundy 10mo ago
  Stuff like this is common in states with no income tax. If public services in two states are equivalent and one has income tax but one doesn’t, the latter state residents pay the same total tax burden through property tax, tolls, and sales tax.
  - BowBun 10mo ago
    Yep, people really think they've hacked America when they move to states with lower/no income tax. Meanwhile they pay 5-figure property taxes on a house they've paid off until the day they die.
    - DetectDefect 10mo ago
      Personal property taxes are deductible in the United States.
      - bdangubic 10mo ago
        capped to a small fraction though so this deduction is really not that much
        deleted 10mo ago
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Devasta 10mo ago
Good. Cars only exist as a viableeans of transport due to vast subsidies and a total reorganization of society to suit them. Motorists should pay the cost of this absurd status quo.
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matt3210 10mo ago
Taxing only the users of a good or service sounds reasonable
- dredmorbius 10mo ago
  There are many indirect users of roads. If you rely on businesses, services, emergency workers, etc., you rely on roads.
KoolKat23 10mo ago
They're wrong on multiple fronts, they're regressive. The poor bear the brunt of them. Despite the bad press, a well run government highway is much cheaper, generally 30% or more of that toll goes directly to maintaining the system and it's profits, there's more efficient funding methods out there. They're natural monopolies, they fill up with traffic regardless of how much you rip people off.
- Alupis 10mo ago
  > The poor bear the brunt of them. Going to need a citation for that, because it seems the wealth(ier) and/or business-classes would bear the most significant burden of toll roads. Typically, in my experience, tolls are assessed at boundaries of cities, regions, and intra-region/city transit is toll-free. Businesses that use the toll road (think trucking/freight, etc) pay tolls because they come from outside of the boundary. Wealthier individuals may commute into the boundary for work, also paying tolls. One can live inside the city of San Francisco and never pay a toll - but someone that lives outside and commutes in for work or business pays tolls every day. Other states, such as Illinois have a vast amount of toll roads - where tolls are trivial (typically) but also still only assessed at boundaries. The roads are often much more well maintained than government roads, since the toll collector has a direct financial interest in maintaining traffic on the roads.
  - mikewarot 10mo ago
    Here in Chicagoland, the major tollways aren't boundary oriented, they're just charging effectively per mile. The same is true of my home state of Indiana. They were supposed to be free once the bonds were paid off, but, of course, that never happened.
    - Alupis 10mo ago
      When I was in the Chicago area, I paid no tolls when I entered and exited the tollway within the same region. Perhaps that has changed within the last 10ish years? It doesn't seem practical to charge tolls at every onramp.
coldtea 10mo ago
1. It's gonna get worse before it gets better. 2. Fooled you! It's not getting better.
chiefalchemist 10mo ago
What’s spreading is mass surveillance. Nearly every toll (in NJ or surrounding states) is done via EZ Pass a/o license plate readers. It’s nearly impossible to travel without being tracked.
- DetectDefect 10mo ago
  It's this. Data is effectively replacing dollars as fiat currency, due in large part to unbridled money printing.
  - chiefalchemist 10mo ago
    The other factor for me is revenue. From tolls to speeding tickets, it’s all revenue streams. No need to increase formal taxes when you can add revenue via other means.
    - DetectDefect 10mo ago
      Data from surveilling toll payers is worth significantly more than the moneys collected from them.
      - chiefalchemist 10mo ago
        Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can’t the gov do surveillance, profit from it, and charge us for the privilege?
ece 10mo ago
I would like to see the ratio of toll prices to public transport available for each state properly normalized. Would be interesting to see a correlation.
_DeadFred_ 10mo ago
[flagged]
- The_President 10mo ago
  Current prices of "for the public good" in New York City for passenger vehicles: - Congestion charge - $9 per day on Ez-Pass - Bridge toll - $10 to $15 per day
loeg 10mo ago
Good! Use fees align incentives, reducing the financial burden on non-users. And users pay a modest fee to get better roads than they would otherwise. It's win-win.
macinjosh 10mo ago
As someone who barely ever drives but still has to pay the same yearly car taxes as everyone else I welcome this. We should be making driving more expensive. It’s deadly, polluting, and traffic wastes so many people’s time.
- floundy 10mo ago
  Walkable cities are a luxury good. Care to share what multiple of the median annual household income a home costs wherever you live? 10x? 20x?
  - Tade0 10mo ago
    They're more like a compromise. As an outsider, to me the framing that USA is "car-oriented" was always off the mark. Cars are just a tool, which people would rather use as little as possible (I mean, who actually enjoys sitting in traffic or having a long commute?). The real issue is the notion that everyone needs crazy amounts of space inside and a yard. I've found this calculator[0] that says that for my family I would need 2280 sq ft to "live comfortably", which to me is an absurd amount, as I live on a third of that and was only ever considering apartments with at maximum half the mentioned square footage. You can't reasonably organise public transport over such a sparsely populated area. Over here we have districts of detached houses and they're notoriously difficult to get in and out of. [0] https://themortgagereports.com/117403/average-home-size-in-the-usa https://themortgagereports.com/117403/average-home-size-in-t...
ajxs 10mo ago
Sydney has an extensive network of toll roads, and it's a nightmare. The state government has outsourced the initial infrastructure development to a private company (Transurban), who pay off their development costs through collecting the toll. It costs taxpayers a fortune. Sydney's road network is so poorly designed that it's difficult to get anywhere without crossing a toll road if you actually value your time. People allege that the state government is deliberately designing bottlenecks into the road network to funnel traffic into toll roads (e.g. westbound traffic on Parramatta Road) and it's difficult to disagree with this assessment. I live in the city and most of my driving is for leisure, yet somehow I still paid $850 in tolls over the last 12 months. Just in case anyone is wondering, there's no 'toll plaza'. Our toll roads have an automated collection system which operates via ALPR.
r2vcap 10mo ago
Suppressing car usage isn’t about punishing individuals; it’s about correcting urban systems that made car dependency the default in the first place. The Lewis–Mogridge position is well established, and making driving less convenient while improving proximity and alternatives is a core principle of sustainable urban planning. A lifestyle that requires burning large amounts of fuel just to buy groceries, or maintaining water-intensive lawns at scale, only works under very specific economic and environmental conditions. As those conditions disappear, cities have to adapt—even if the cultural shift feels uncomfortable at first.
- xedrac 10mo ago
  I'll take my sprawling suburb with a big yard to grow ample food any day over a densely populated and carefully planned cityscape. With the advent of cheaper solar panels and electric vehicles, it's not a big issue.
  - potato3732842 10mo ago
    I don't even give a shit about the yard. Frankly it's a pain in the ass. It's about getting away from "the wrong kind"[1] of people. [1]calm down that's not who I'm talking about.
  - array_key_first 10mo ago
    Are you actually growing your own food though? Or is your yard a grass monoculture that serves more of a vanity project than anything useful? And maybe you are, which, good on you! But I don't think most Americans are.
    - xedrac 10mo ago
      Yes! I love growing my own food. I have 1/4 acre with 10 fruit trees, 12 grape vines, and a 20×60' vegetable patch.
josefritzishere 10mo ago
In the supply-side economic models, regressive taxes are generally understood to contract the economy. Tolls in that model are no different than tariffs.
crashbunny 10mo ago
In australia, big corp donate a few thousand and give cushy "advisory role" jobs to politicians after they leave office in exchange for contracts to build, own and run private toll roads. It has been proven many times it's cheaper for the government, and therefore tax payers, for the government to get a loan and build public highways themselves. yet, all new highways are private. big corp get given the land for the roads and have builtin toll price increases. One company raises prices 4% every 6 months. According to google, that means the toll doubles every 9 years. For me to drive 22km to the CBD via toll roads costs $25 one way, and I save 10 minutes most time of the day. In 10 years time, it will probably be around $40 one way. big corp make a billion or two in profit every year.
femto 10mo ago
Look to Sydney, Australia, if you want to see where this is heading, as Sydney is completely tied up with toll roads. On the point of them being regressive, the NSW government has been forced to reduce political pressure by capping annual toll expenditure with a government funded rebate system. It's no coincidence that the companies behind the expansion of US toll roads are mostly the Australian companies that run Sydney's toll roads: Transurban, Macquarie, IFM, ...
- darknavi 10mo ago
  Doesn't Sydney also have world class public transport infrastructure? Seems like a pretty decent trade to me.
  - throwaway2037 10mo ago
    > Doesn't Sydney also have world class public transport infrastructure? I did a double take when I read that. Where did you get that idea? By world class, let's say top 10 or 20 cities. Surely, there are plenty of these cities in East Asia and Europe that are far better than Sydney. I wonder if Mexico City or Sao Paolo has better public transport than Sydney.
foota 10mo ago
Honestly? Good. Puts them on a more even footing with other infrastructure. If trains aren't free neither should highways be.
1970-01-01 10mo ago
Toll roads are fine so long as they're flowing. If they're jamming, and I'm still paying, then that fits the definition of a scam.
- ironmagma 10mo ago
  If the goal is to reduce traffic you can use a highway ramp signal instead.
diego_moita 10mo ago
And Americans still don't get it: cars are not a natural fact of life, a birthright endowment. Driving a car imposes costs on everyone. It requires public infrastructure, pollutes the environment, endangers lives, etc. Cars are a private privilege, and toll roads are a way to make people aware of that. But I wonder how the country that hates socialism will see this privatization of costs. Do I expect Americans to start thinking of making cities for people instead of cars? Will they begin taking public transportation seriously? No, they won't.
- smurda 10mo ago
  On the East Coast there are more cities with dense populations, so public transit can be effective and car ownership rates are lower. In the West, many cities are urban sprawls that built out instead of up, so public transit is less effective and car ownership rates are higher. I wish LA or Phoenix or Vegas was dense living where public transit could be effective, but since they’re urban sprawls and public transit isn’t aa effective as a densely populated city, most people own cars to get around.
- poisonborz 10mo ago
  Cars require the least amount of public infra and can be run relatively cheaply, allow for free movement. Contrast this with literally every other type of western public transport project going several times over budget, expensive to use and maintain and breaks down after a decade. I'm all for the idea, but that's the reality.
  - diego_moita 10mo ago
    > Cars require the least amount of public infra and can be run relatively cheaply, allow for free movement. Source? > Contrast this with literally every other type of western public transport project going several times over budget, expensive to use and maintain and breaks down after a decade. Source?
- hexbin010 10mo ago
  > Cars are a private privilege People might actually not laugh at this when the government builds public transport, walkable cities, jobs within walk distance etc
technick 10mo ago
Every toll system is tied together with glue and is easily defeated by hiding your license plate, which also has the added benefit of making it more difficult to track your movement.
- Tade0 10mo ago
  In my region that's just speedrunning getting a fine. The offending vehicle is whisked away at the exit booth by law enforcement.
ghtbircshotbe 10mo ago
Gas taxes go down when people use EVs. The government raises the yearly tax for EVs and hybrids, though not based on distance driven (where I am). I can imagine they do it in places with more EVs or where there are more controls like smog tests. Or, why not put the road tax on tires, which wear based on distance driven? I suppose that might get kind of high if you're paying $0.005 per mile and the tires are supposed to last 50,000 miles for a total of $250 for 4 new tires.

208 points by smurda 10mo ago

Not only are they spreading, but existing ones have tolls constantly increased. Some were built with the idea of the toll expiring once the costs of construction were paid off. But instead they just become a new state tax source forever, subsidizing out of control spending.

lotsofpulp 10mo ago
Paying for the road-time you use, like any shared resource, seems fair to me. It would be nice to see decreases in earned income taxes though. If the retort to this is it impacts poorer people more, then that is a separate problem fixed by redistributing more cash, so that the wealth gap is smaller. Edit: to respond to reply about trucks causing more damage to road: Construction costs are one cost of roads, but another cost is time cost due to congestion (and resulting effects of delays due to congestion). A variable rate toll that also incorporates congestion is the ideal way to manage road use, much like paying more for electricity or other resources at peak demand to modulate demand.
- morkalork 10mo ago
  Taxes on gas?
  - lotsofpulp 10mo ago
    Gas is a different shared resource (e.g. it’s effects on air quality/climate change) than road capacity.
    - jtbayly 10mo ago
      The gas tax is supposedly to pay for roads. Now that they are supposedly paying for the roads via tolls, I guess we can expect that they will not decrease the gas tax but add another tax that supposedly pays for the roads.
      - Arainach 10mo ago
        The gas tax has never paid for full road maintenance. It's always been subsidized from other funds.
      - vel0city 10mo ago
        There are still all the roads that aren't toll roads that still need that tax revenue to support.
  - selectodude 10mo ago
    Unfortunately, it hasn’t seen a big jump in a while, all cars are getting heavier and electrified, and gas mileage is going up.
  - redwall_hp 10mo ago
    Odometry tax when you register the vehicle, with tiers based on the curb weight. Also higher gas taxes for carbon reasons.
    - WillAdams 10mo ago
      Add a mechanism for folks to file for a rebate for distance driven on private roads (an uncle's driveway is roughly a quarter mile, so half a mile six days a week 52 times each year would equal a 156 mile reduction).
- inglor_cz 10mo ago
  The vast majority of damage on the road is caused by vehicles with high axle load, e.g. trucks, especially overloaded trucks. IIRC the damage is proportional to fourth power of the axle load. As a consequence, personal cars barely register. It would make sense to collect toll from trucks only, and possibly weigh them all, because overloaded trucks are extra damaging to the road.
  - dietrichepp 10mo ago
    If we only had trucks on the road, we’d need less road, right? The street where I live could be about a third of the width if it were not for personal cars.
  - DangitBobby 10mo ago
    To carry this further, of maintenance taxes for roads were structured appropriately, trucks would pay so much that it would be prohibitively expensive to ship across the states in Semis. We'd likely see a resurgence of rail transport.
  - floundy 10mo ago
    Rhode Island is trying this. The gantries have been up for years, but it was challenged in court by the trucking lobby. The state prevailed with some concessions, and is planning to reinstate the truck tolls soon. Probably, due to the small size of RI, it will just cause goods not bound directly for RI to divert along I-395 up through CT and MA, and I-290 and I-495 in MA.
- NegativeK 10mo ago
  > If the retort to this is it impacts poorer people more We've ended up, though, with a growing wealth gap and more tolls.
toomuchtodo 10mo ago
Roads cost money, costs are just catching up to reality. If folks are unhappy now when taxes are at historical lows while we accumulate all sorts of off book debt (in this case, “deferred maintenance”), further sadness is ahead. If one does not care to pay for roads, my recommendation is to live somewhere one doesn’t need roads, or the per capita costs are lower due to density (urban areas, broadly speaking), making paying the costs more palatable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/highway-and-road-expenditures https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative... (“In 2021, state and local governments spent $206 billion, or 6 percent of direct general spending, on highways and roads. As a share of state and local direct general expenditures, highways and roads were the fifth-largest expenditure in 2021.”) https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-14/unpave-low-traffic-roads-to-save-energy-and-money/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-14/unpave-low-tra... (“The U.S. has 4.1 million miles of roads (1.9 million paved, 2.2 million gravel). About 3 million miles of roads have less than 2,000 vehicles a day, less than 15% of all traffic. The paved portion of these low-volume roads ought to be evaluated for their potential to be unpaved.”) (very similar to how climate costs are causing agriculture and insurance costs to snap to reality, with similar sadness; debts coming due)
- fogzen 10mo ago
  We could fund roads (and everything else) using a progressive income tax, so that everyone pays and the wealthiest would pay the largest share.
  - toomuchtodo 10mo ago
    Not opposed, but to achieve this with the current election cycle cadence will take at least 5 years, if not longer (Congressional cycles). Also, I think Medicare for All is a more pressing use of tax revenue than pouring good money after bad into sprawl infrastructure that will continue to decline in use as rural America hollows out and people keep moving to urban cores. To observe this, overlay predicted rural America population decline with road infrastructure, which you can also use to forecast which road infrastructure we should retreat from maintaining over time. “Everyone wants civilization but nobody wants to pay taxes” is a hard concept to solve for, most especially when those with nothing or no tax liability (very roughly the bottom 60% of Americans) advocate for the wealthiest from a failed mental model.
ghaff 10mo ago
I assume automatic tolls via transponders tend to make tolls a lot less transparent in practice.
kotaKat 10mo ago
laughs in New York I-90 Yep. It's great that I have to pay to use this stretch of I-90 and then on top of that if I end up at the wrong rest area on a Sunday I won't be able to access every vendor (because they picked Chick-Fil-A at some locations).
bigstrat2003 10mo ago
As my grandfather wisely observed: there's no such thing as a temporary tax. I have seen this to be true in my own lifetime, as each and every time a "temporary" tax increase would expire it gets extended.

hoppyhoppy2 10mo ago

https://archive.is/ZvPtX https://archive.is/ZvPtX

arjie 10mo ago

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.

ninalanyon 10mo ago
Tolls are a regressive tax; they disproportionately affect the poor.
everforward 10mo ago
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.
- spwa4 10mo ago
  > 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.

_ea1k 10mo ago

I don't necessarily see this as a bad trend. Eventually a tax on mileage and weight would make the most sense vs the current attempts to use fuel taxes as a proxy for those things.

whoknowsidont 10mo ago
Why do we need public funds to build a private authority that pays people absurd amounts of money who don't actually do anything instead of just you know.... building the road like we always have. For the public. If we're going to spend the money anyways why do we need private profits? Furthermore, just tax the vehicles that are actually doing damage to the roads. i.e., trucks. A honda civic barely does anything to a road. Where a semi-truck is EXPONENTIALLY more damaging.
- dietrichepp 10mo ago
  The civic barely does anything to a road, except require its existence and maintenance, and it turns out that roads are expensive to build and maintain (even if only damaged by weather).
- _aavaa_ 10mo ago
  A highway is not a public good. It is a publicly subsidized good for private consumption. Can I use the highway if I don’t have a car? (Barely) Can I use it for anything non driving related (like a downtown street where lanes can be repurposed for outdoor seating)? No I agree with you on what does the majority of the damage.
  - potato3732842 10mo ago
    >A highway is not a public good. It is a publicly subsidized good for private consumption. So is every park. What's the point of this language game?
  - morkalork 10mo ago
    I don't understand, there are plenty of other things the public pays for that you can't use for other, unintended purposes. You can't fly your hobby drone out of a public airport just because you want.

AnotherGoodName 10mo ago

There’s no more toll booths. It’s a big step function change in viability of toll roads.

nfw2 10mo ago

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

kiernanmcgowan 10mo ago
It’s also a direct usage tax to support road maintenance. Heavier users of the road ways end up contributing more to the maintenance of the public good. We had a proxy for that via gasoline taxes but with EV becoming more common we need to find a replacement for that revenue.
- haskellandrust 10mo ago
  The gas tax hasn’t kept up with inflation, EVs are only a secondary contributor to the shortfall. Most states have been leeching from their general funds to keep up with highway maintenance. California has raised theres fair aggressively, though.
- pclmulqdq 10mo ago
  There are several states that have an EV registration surcharge that replaces gas tax. It's not popular with the pro-EV crowd.
  - vel0city 10mo ago
    I'm fine with a decently fair registration tax to offset the gas taxes, but the one in my state is the equivalent of 1,000 gallons of gas for the state gas taxes. If the car was a 35mpg hybrid that would be 35,000mi of equivalent driving. This is incredibly unfair.
    - Loughla 10mo ago
      If I owned an ev for 3 years, the tax means I save money.
      - 10mo ago

tonymet 10mo ago

Traditional taxes are democratic -- if the legislature raises a tax, they can be voted out. Creative revenue approaches sound efficient, but you don't want efficiency with spending. Efficiency means that spending will grow unabated. In my state they've had record revenue for 12 years (until just lately). Regardless of each record, they continued to outspend revenue into a deficit. Commercial enterprises are bounded by revenue (and debt). Public agencies used to have a feedback loop (losing the next election), but in many states there is little consequence for deficit spending. Don't give spendthrifts more ways to spend money. They will always exceed the revenue they generate.

DangitBobby 10mo ago
On the other hand, private companies have no accountability to the public whatsoever, and as long as their grift is revenue positive they can exist forever regardless of how damaging they are to the lives of everyone around them. Private prisons and toll road companies are great examples of parasitic private companies that absolutely must not be allowed to exist.
- tonymet 10mo ago
  I agree that may occur, though we likely disagree on how representative it is. Regardless, 2 wrongs don’t make a right. Moreover, most of the public spending goes into what you would likely consider to be grifter enterprises.

websiteapi 10mo ago

it would never happen, but ideally toll roads would be dynamically priced such that the average speed is always within 10% of the speed limit. congestion fixed. earmark this money in a way that can't be siphoned and build public transportation with it. in addition buy fleets of buses with the cash that are exempt and analyze the destinations and origins of the traffic and put them there.

nfw2 10mo ago
demand for transport is not that elastic though
- hamdingers 10mo ago
  It's more elastic than you might assume. There's a phenomenon called traffic evaporation, when a major roadway is closed or diminished (even unexpectedly), people adjust their travel behavior such that travel times stay relatively constant. Los Angeles has many such examples, one recent and well studied one was the closure of the 10 freeway after a fire.
- dangus 10mo ago
  It totally is. Demand can be induced. You can build more highways/roads, you can build more transit options, you can decide how to design roads and handle zoning, affecting how far people go (where are their jobs and stores?), you can decide to build protected bike lanes or build prioritized bus lanes, etc. All of these factors and more affect demand for transportation.
- whimsicalism 10mo ago
  it’s actually been shocking to me how elastic it is. it frankly pisses me off how much time i spend in traffic behind people who are apparently fully deterred by a mere $1-2 fee. we should absolutely have faster lanes for people who are driving for higher value reasons.
zdragnar 10mo ago
People already driving generally aren't likely to change their destination, and all the traffic headed toward the dynamically priced toll road still needs to be diverted in a way that they will reach wherever they were going. You aren't going to change congestion unless you fix the balance between throughput and volume. Dynamic pricing doesn't improve throughput, and it doesn't decrease volume- it just forces some of that volume onto less well equipped roads.

survirtual 10mo ago

Every single lifestyle item of a modern life, whether you have a car or not, depends on the road system. If you want food, products, or services, you depend on the roads. This means it should be taxed universally and equitably. We should all contribute our fair share to maintain the roads. Tolls are a regressive tax on low-income people who do the most to make society work, and it is unfortunate that more people do not see this. What's more, they are generally administered by corrupt and inefficient private for-profit orgs. This creates even more overhead which then costs more money. These orgs generally have slimy deals with city and state governments, while directly profiting from public works that built the road system to begin with. There are much better ways to fund the road system. Tolls are among the worst.

ChadNauseam 10mo ago
I don't agree with this perspective. A tax on negative externalities doesn't have to be regressive. It depends on what the tax money is spent on. This is an extreme example, but if you added a congestion tax and then spent the money on a tiny UBI, you might generate $10/person/month, which would be a major uplift to the poorest in our society who don't drive at all. The argument against congestion pricing is further weakened by the fact that those harmed (drivers, pay the tolls) are also those who benefit (drivers, who enjoy less congestion). The ones who are harmed the most are those displaced from driving, who have to find something else to do and don't enjoy the benefits of reduced convention. That's using congestion pricing as an example, but the same argument applies to taxing vehicles in proportion to the wear they impose on roads. Business owners who pay the tax are free to raise their prices, which is how it's supposed to work. They're currently raising their prices because their drivers waste time in congested traffic and because they pay taxes to the government for road maintenance. For an analogy, it also makes sense to tax companies who dump their waste in rivers, to the extent that their waste dirties the rivers. If there is some ultra-valuable product that could only be made by dirtying a river (idk, let's say that for some reason insulin had to be made that way), it would be a good that it could still be made, while discouraging people from dirtying rivers for little reason. No one would say "polluting the river should be free because we all use products that are made by polluting rivers." If polluting rivers were free and the government just taxed everyone to clean them up afterwards, we probably all really would use products made by polluting rivers! but that doesn't mean we would be worse off by taxing it directly. That said, I agree that there's no reason for tolls to fund the road system. Hypothecated taxes are generally not a good idea, despite the fact that they're very intuitively appealing.

jarjoura 10mo ago

Aren't toll roads the norm? It was radical in the 1940s and 1950s to create public freeways. Toll roads do have real consequences and, do, raise the cost of everything that needs to travel over it. It also means things that could exist on one side of a bridge or tolled section will relocate to other areas to avoid tolls. Not against them, but I also don't like them. I personally think it's a failure of a state managing its roads where the cost has to become disproporiationally spread.

ghaff 10mo ago
>Aren't toll roads the norm? No. I won't say they're rare but they're not especially common in the US.
pinkmuffinere 10mo ago
Do you perhaps live in Florida or Oklahoma? They are quite rare in CA, the southwestern states in general, and the upper midwest.
Bengalilol 10mo ago
> "For now, drivers pay to access just 6,300 miles of America’s 160,000 or so miles of highway"

drnick1 10mo ago

Very odd, an article about America, but mostly using British spelling except for prices in $.

digital-cygnet 10mo ago
This is normal for the Economist. I don't really understand why -- they clearly have an American edition (I get their print version in the US and its headlines and organization is totally different than the same edition in the UK), yet they leave all the "colours" and "boffins" in there, when it would be pretty trivial to regionalize the language same as they do the currencies and structure. My assumption is that being a bit eccentric and foreign-seeming is part of their brand.
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hexbin010 10mo ago
Perhaps payback for tourists using the word 'dollars' in London :P

fortyseven 10mo ago

Aside from money, I think one of the major issues I had with toll booths was... Well the booths. Stopping, having to fish out exact change, planning ahead to make sure you had enough change, etc. Nowadays we have those boxes that we can put in the windshield that automatically bill us later. And that's made me far more willing to take a trip via the highway. Removes a lot of anxiety. And, so far, at least in my experience, they work.

floundy 10mo ago
In the northeast I regularly see idiots slowing down for the high speed toll lanes that have explicit signage not to slow down. People going 65-70MPH, then as the toll approaches one car brakes down to 45MPH because they’re afraid their transponder won’t be read or something.

blauditore 10mo ago

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

hamdingers 10mo ago
The alternatives are impractical due to all the space cars and their infrastructure consume (walking, transit), or due to the danger cars pose (bicycles, motorbikes, small cars). The US has converged because we are trapped in a vicious cycle.
- underlipton 10mo ago
  The cycle would have broken in 2008 if we hadn't bailed out the auto manufacturers. Pro-free market until the moment it counts.
  - senordevnyc 10mo ago
    Wait, what would that have changed? Are you imagining that we’d have fewer cars in America in 2025 if we hadn’t bailed out the manufacturers in 2008?
    - underlipton 10mo ago
      Obviously it's not instantaneous, and you still have imports wanting to fill the vacuum, but a collapse of the US auto industry means 1) lower replacement rate in the near term as the remainders try to ramp up production, 2) difficulty servicing the legacy fleet, and 3) a massive blow in terms of sentiment and outlook. In this hypothetical, an American institution blew itself up and made a lot of people's lives more difficult. Do you think they earn that trust back easily? Or is it a post-bust clarity moment, where people finally have a moment to think about how much money is poured into their personal cars and auto infrastructure writ large? Because, I mean, we did see something similar to that with the pandemic and a mass shift in perspectives on work culture, which corporations had to fight mightily to hobble. You also saw a similar shift during the Great Depression, and it took banks literal generations to rebuild their reputation with the public. In both cases, you saw massive ramifications for the way in which people lived. I do think that no auto bailouts in 2008 ends America's love affair with the car as we knew it. So, yes, fewer cars. Or maybe, at least, different cars.

ronbenton 10mo ago

I took a transportation engineering class a while back and one bit of knowledge that stuck with me is tolls are the only effective traffic relief mechanisms for a roadway. Other mechanisms like adding lanes just invite more cars and traffic is not relieved. I never checked whether this was true, but sounded reasonable.

bwhiting2356 10mo ago
Adding lanes may not cut congestion in the long term, but it can increase throughput and overall utility by moving more people and goods.
- ronbenton 10mo ago
  I don't doubt it. It is quite a while ago so I don't fully recall the talk that my professor gave, but I don't believe he intended to mean adding lanes was useless, just that they didn't help with congestion of the particular roadway
  - bluGill 10mo ago
    If adding lanes doesn't help you didn't add enough. People live in a city to do things and you need to enable that by preventing congestion. i don't know how to afford the 50 more lanes that most cities need though. I suggest better transit.
    - loglog 10mo ago
      Removing parts of the city to add more lanes will also help decreasing demand - it's a win-win!
- cmovq 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ronbenton 10mo ago

shkkmo 10mo ago

I had a very negative view toward toll roads untill I found the Road Guy Rob youtube channel. His video on the Oklahoma toll roads completely changed my perspective. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EzPPmiKFf5I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EzPPmiKFf5I

anorphirith 10mo ago

paid HOV lanes in the bay area are a so enraging. they created a problem by restricting the number of lanes and increasing traffic and offered a monetary solution at the same time by having you pay for the “fast” lane

billy99k 10mo ago

I recently traveled to Florida. There are toll roads everywhere. Luckily, I got the unlimited daily toll package when I rented my car.

floundy 10mo ago
Stuff like this is common in states with no income tax. If public services in two states are equivalent and one has income tax but one doesn’t, the latter state residents pay the same total tax burden through property tax, tolls, and sales tax.
- BowBun 10mo ago
  Yep, people really think they've hacked America when they move to states with lower/no income tax. Meanwhile they pay 5-figure property taxes on a house they've paid off until the day they die.
  - DetectDefect 10mo ago
    Personal property taxes are deductible in the United States.
    - bdangubic 10mo ago
      capped to a small fraction though so this deduction is really not that much
      - deleted 10mo ago
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Devasta 10mo ago

Good. Cars only exist as a viableeans of transport due to vast subsidies and a total reorganization of society to suit them. Motorists should pay the cost of this absurd status quo.

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matt3210 10mo ago

Taxing only the users of a good or service sounds reasonable

dredmorbius 10mo ago
There are many indirect users of roads. If you rely on businesses, services, emergency workers, etc., you rely on roads.

KoolKat23 10mo ago

They're wrong on multiple fronts, they're regressive. The poor bear the brunt of them. Despite the bad press, a well run government highway is much cheaper, generally 30% or more of that toll goes directly to maintaining the system and it's profits, there's more efficient funding methods out there. They're natural monopolies, they fill up with traffic regardless of how much you rip people off.

Alupis 10mo ago
> The poor bear the brunt of them. Going to need a citation for that, because it seems the wealth(ier) and/or business-classes would bear the most significant burden of toll roads. Typically, in my experience, tolls are assessed at boundaries of cities, regions, and intra-region/city transit is toll-free. Businesses that use the toll road (think trucking/freight, etc) pay tolls because they come from outside of the boundary. Wealthier individuals may commute into the boundary for work, also paying tolls. One can live inside the city of San Francisco and never pay a toll - but someone that lives outside and commutes in for work or business pays tolls every day. Other states, such as Illinois have a vast amount of toll roads - where tolls are trivial (typically) but also still only assessed at boundaries. The roads are often much more well maintained than government roads, since the toll collector has a direct financial interest in maintaining traffic on the roads.
- mikewarot 10mo ago
  Here in Chicagoland, the major tollways aren't boundary oriented, they're just charging effectively per mile. The same is true of my home state of Indiana. They were supposed to be free once the bonds were paid off, but, of course, that never happened.
  - Alupis 10mo ago
    When I was in the Chicago area, I paid no tolls when I entered and exited the tollway within the same region. Perhaps that has changed within the last 10ish years? It doesn't seem practical to charge tolls at every onramp.

coldtea 10mo ago

1. It's gonna get worse before it gets better. 2. Fooled you! It's not getting better.

chiefalchemist 10mo ago

What’s spreading is mass surveillance. Nearly every toll (in NJ or surrounding states) is done via EZ Pass a/o license plate readers. It’s nearly impossible to travel without being tracked.

DetectDefect 10mo ago
It's this. Data is effectively replacing dollars as fiat currency, due in large part to unbridled money printing.
- chiefalchemist 10mo ago
  The other factor for me is revenue. From tolls to speeding tickets, it’s all revenue streams. No need to increase formal taxes when you can add revenue via other means.
  - DetectDefect 10mo ago
    Data from surveilling toll payers is worth significantly more than the moneys collected from them.
    - chiefalchemist 10mo ago
      Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can’t the gov do surveillance, profit from it, and charge us for the privilege?

ece 10mo ago

I would like to see the ratio of toll prices to public transport available for each state properly normalized. Would be interesting to see a correlation.

_DeadFred_ 10mo ago

[flagged]

The_President 10mo ago
Current prices of "for the public good" in New York City for passenger vehicles: - Congestion charge - $9 per day on Ez-Pass - Bridge toll - $10 to $15 per day

loeg 10mo ago

Good! Use fees align incentives, reducing the financial burden on non-users. And users pay a modest fee to get better roads than they would otherwise. It's win-win.

macinjosh 10mo ago

As someone who barely ever drives but still has to pay the same yearly car taxes as everyone else I welcome this. We should be making driving more expensive. It’s deadly, polluting, and traffic wastes so many people’s time.

floundy 10mo ago
Walkable cities are a luxury good. Care to share what multiple of the median annual household income a home costs wherever you live? 10x? 20x?
- Tade0 10mo ago
  They're more like a compromise. As an outsider, to me the framing that USA is "car-oriented" was always off the mark. Cars are just a tool, which people would rather use as little as possible (I mean, who actually enjoys sitting in traffic or having a long commute?). The real issue is the notion that everyone needs crazy amounts of space inside and a yard. I've found this calculator[0] that says that for my family I would need 2280 sq ft to "live comfortably", which to me is an absurd amount, as I live on a third of that and was only ever considering apartments with at maximum half the mentioned square footage. You can't reasonably organise public transport over such a sparsely populated area. Over here we have districts of detached houses and they're notoriously difficult to get in and out of. [0] https://themortgagereports.com/117403/average-home-size-in-the-usa https://themortgagereports.com/117403/average-home-size-in-t...

ajxs 10mo ago

Sydney has an extensive network of toll roads, and it's a nightmare. The state government has outsourced the initial infrastructure development to a private company (Transurban), who pay off their development costs through collecting the toll. It costs taxpayers a fortune. Sydney's road network is so poorly designed that it's difficult to get anywhere without crossing a toll road if you actually value your time. People allege that the state government is deliberately designing bottlenecks into the road network to funnel traffic into toll roads (e.g. westbound traffic on Parramatta Road) and it's difficult to disagree with this assessment. I live in the city and most of my driving is for leisure, yet somehow I still paid $850 in tolls over the last 12 months. Just in case anyone is wondering, there's no 'toll plaza'. Our toll roads have an automated collection system which operates via ALPR.

r2vcap 10mo ago

Suppressing car usage isn’t about punishing individuals; it’s about correcting urban systems that made car dependency the default in the first place. The Lewis–Mogridge position is well established, and making driving less convenient while improving proximity and alternatives is a core principle of sustainable urban planning. A lifestyle that requires burning large amounts of fuel just to buy groceries, or maintaining water-intensive lawns at scale, only works under very specific economic and environmental conditions. As those conditions disappear, cities have to adapt—even if the cultural shift feels uncomfortable at first.

xedrac 10mo ago
I'll take my sprawling suburb with a big yard to grow ample food any day over a densely populated and carefully planned cityscape. With the advent of cheaper solar panels and electric vehicles, it's not a big issue.
- potato3732842 10mo ago
  I don't even give a shit about the yard. Frankly it's a pain in the ass. It's about getting away from "the wrong kind"[1] of people. [1]calm down that's not who I'm talking about.
- array_key_first 10mo ago
  Are you actually growing your own food though? Or is your yard a grass monoculture that serves more of a vanity project than anything useful? And maybe you are, which, good on you! But I don't think most Americans are.
  - xedrac 10mo ago
    Yes! I love growing my own food. I have 1/4 acre with 10 fruit trees, 12 grape vines, and a 20×60' vegetable patch.

josefritzishere 10mo ago

In the supply-side economic models, regressive taxes are generally understood to contract the economy. Tolls in that model are no different than tariffs.

crashbunny 10mo ago

In australia, big corp donate a few thousand and give cushy "advisory role" jobs to politicians after they leave office in exchange for contracts to build, own and run private toll roads. It has been proven many times it's cheaper for the government, and therefore tax payers, for the government to get a loan and build public highways themselves. yet, all new highways are private. big corp get given the land for the roads and have builtin toll price increases. One company raises prices 4% every 6 months. According to google, that means the toll doubles every 9 years. For me to drive 22km to the CBD via toll roads costs $25 one way, and I save 10 minutes most time of the day. In 10 years time, it will probably be around $40 one way. big corp make a billion or two in profit every year.

femto 10mo ago

Look to Sydney, Australia, if you want to see where this is heading, as Sydney is completely tied up with toll roads. On the point of them being regressive, the NSW government has been forced to reduce political pressure by capping annual toll expenditure with a government funded rebate system. It's no coincidence that the companies behind the expansion of US toll roads are mostly the Australian companies that run Sydney's toll roads: Transurban, Macquarie, IFM, ...

darknavi 10mo ago
Doesn't Sydney also have world class public transport infrastructure? Seems like a pretty decent trade to me.
- throwaway2037 10mo ago
  > Doesn't Sydney also have world class public transport infrastructure? I did a double take when I read that. Where did you get that idea? By world class, let's say top 10 or 20 cities. Surely, there are plenty of these cities in East Asia and Europe that are far better than Sydney. I wonder if Mexico City or Sao Paolo has better public transport than Sydney.

foota 10mo ago

Honestly? Good. Puts them on a more even footing with other infrastructure. If trains aren't free neither should highways be.

1970-01-01 10mo ago

Toll roads are fine so long as they're flowing. If they're jamming, and I'm still paying, then that fits the definition of a scam.

ironmagma 10mo ago
If the goal is to reduce traffic you can use a highway ramp signal instead.

diego_moita 10mo ago

And Americans still don't get it: cars are not a natural fact of life, a birthright endowment. Driving a car imposes costs on everyone. It requires public infrastructure, pollutes the environment, endangers lives, etc. Cars are a private privilege, and toll roads are a way to make people aware of that. But I wonder how the country that hates socialism will see this privatization of costs. Do I expect Americans to start thinking of making cities for people instead of cars? Will they begin taking public transportation seriously? No, they won't.

smurda 10mo ago
On the East Coast there are more cities with dense populations, so public transit can be effective and car ownership rates are lower. In the West, many cities are urban sprawls that built out instead of up, so public transit is less effective and car ownership rates are higher. I wish LA or Phoenix or Vegas was dense living where public transit could be effective, but since they’re urban sprawls and public transit isn’t aa effective as a densely populated city, most people own cars to get around.
poisonborz 10mo ago
Cars require the least amount of public infra and can be run relatively cheaply, allow for free movement. Contrast this with literally every other type of western public transport project going several times over budget, expensive to use and maintain and breaks down after a decade. I'm all for the idea, but that's the reality.
- diego_moita 10mo ago
  > Cars require the least amount of public infra and can be run relatively cheaply, allow for free movement. Source? > Contrast this with literally every other type of western public transport project going several times over budget, expensive to use and maintain and breaks down after a decade. Source?
hexbin010 10mo ago
> Cars are a private privilege People might actually not laugh at this when the government builds public transport, walkable cities, jobs within walk distance etc

technick 10mo ago

Every toll system is tied together with glue and is easily defeated by hiding your license plate, which also has the added benefit of making it more difficult to track your movement.

Tade0 10mo ago
In my region that's just speedrunning getting a fine. The offending vehicle is whisked away at the exit booth by law enforcement.

ghtbircshotbe 10mo ago

Gas taxes go down when people use EVs. The government raises the yearly tax for EVs and hybrids, though not based on distance driven (where I am). I can imagine they do it in places with more EVs or where there are more controls like smog tests. Or, why not put the road tax on tires, which wear based on distance driven? I suppose that might get kind of high if you're paying $0.005 per mile and the tires are supposed to last 50,000 miles for a total of $250 for 4 new tires.