That's the actual problem with CA in general if you haven't noticed. Be good and watch them take everything.

If you drive in the FasTrak lanes without an account you pay the fee + $10 surcharge (for a first time violation), and it goes up on the second violation:

https://www.bayareafastrak.org/en/help/invoices-and-penaltie...

I'm having a hard time finding a citation but according to Google's AI summary if the second violation is unpaid they put a hold on your DMV registration, and the fine itself can be sent to a collection agency.

I agree empirically I see people driving through the lane without a tag (i.e., no number shows up in the overhead display), but maybe these are people with FasTrak accounts being lazy?

To be fair, this is already true of driving in general. Often in commuter traffic you’ll see one guy driving extremely unsafely, darting in and out of lanes passing everyone as fast as they can. You know this person does this every day for years, saving time by putting everyone else in danger.

I really wish we would have special enforcement for just this (and transit), and just adjust the fines and staffing levels until enforcement breaks even on costs, and evasion is minimal.

And make the fines based on income.

The HOV lanes cause absurd amounts of congestion, both from encouraging all the HOV drivers to aggressively switch lanes, and because they greatly increase the speed differential between lanes.

They’re a money / surveillance grab.

If they snap the license plate and no fast pass they send a bill in the mail for the full monthly cost of a pass if I recall correctly

Can’t you pay to be in the HOV lane?

Seems like a pretty ideal system. Having that extra lane wouldn’t solve any issues for most drivers. For high occupancy or those willing to pay, it does.

We just need better HOV enforcement. Preferably with space lasers.

You can't see that they're in violation: the RF transponder effects compliance and you pay when using the lane, if you're talking about the lanes i used to use to great effect, for money.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FasTrak )

Traffic is one of the most boring fucking things to talk about.

If you want to feel pissed about something: One of the most popular new cars purchased in California was the Jeep Wrangler 4xe, because it gave you HOV access and a $7,500 tax credit, even though nobody charges it and its battery is anemic anyway.

^ There's a deep lesson in this comment.

It would be better if we had congestion pricing for all lanes. Then it would be less of an issue.

> It is a system that punishes people willing to follow the rules.

Every system?

If you want to disincentivize usage of certain things, money is generally the most effective option. Yes, some rich folks won't be bothered, but even fairly low amounts make most people think twice. Too many cars are a problem in many parts of the world, for a number of reasons (noise, smog, traffic jams, or parking space in cities), so nudging people towards alternative usage patterns is worthwhile in my opinion.

The fastest highway in the United States is the 85 mph controlled access public-private venture toll road east of Austin. State income tax is not a thing in Texas, and that road would have otherwise not been completed at the price or schedule it was built on without the backing of the private company that built it.

Couldn't disagree more. People should be able to pay more for use of better infrastructure. If $3-$8 a day isn't worth it for you, there's a free option that's totally acceptable.

> 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.

Wouldn’t fast efficient light rail been generally better? From a social and economic perspective it would be more efficient. The real problem with that only tends to be political, namely there is a strange aversion to properly built public infrastructure

Of course, this project cost $2.1 billion, including $815 million to build the toll lanes in the freeway’s center.

And it could be made ineffective as regional expansion continues. As soon as enough people who are willing to pay the toll saturates capacity you end up with the same issue (“just one more lane bro”). I see this all the time in the DC metro area’s toll express lanes that often save no significant time.

Another effective way to control highway congestion is to get people off of highways and invest in your transit system, make it better than driving so that people don’t drive as often.

But maybe Houston is too far gone for that.

For comparison, the Chicago red line extension project adds 5 miles of heavy rail for about twice the cost, so 4x more per mile. But the Houston toll lane project doesn’t do anything positive for adjacent property values like new rail stations do. Chicago will get money back from more property taxes and the new stations will relieve traffic on the Dan Ryan.

Transit lines get faster as ridership increases due to the ability to increase schedule frequency, the exact opposite of highways.

I am not saying Houston should magically turn into 1800s-era urban fabric but maybe some decent park and ride commuter transit would be a start? There are cities in Texas with 6 figure populations that have NO public bus system.

In Tennessee (other states, too), it is not illegal to have a trailer hitch ball in front of your license plate. They're recently begun erecting ALPRs everywhere...

...so I have a trailer hitch ball hung entirely across my plate — not considered "obstructing view" de jure, but YMMV (depending on officer).

Tennessee does not issue license plates for most trailers, either, so you can easily & even more legally conceal your license plate when towing.

Anything else that obstructs the view is illegal (including bicycle racks, leaves, dirt, lenses). But not trailers & hitch balls.

You don’t have to be wealthy to pay to use them, you just have to value the time savings more than others. Imagine a “poor” person late for their job where they will get fired, they might value the lane more than a “rich” person just cruising around for fun. Whereas if it weren’t an option at all the poor person in this scenario loses their job and is strictly worse off.

Also isn’t it more fair to charge people using the roads than everyone? What if someone doesn’t even drive should they have to pay taxes for roads?

And in the absence of these congestion fees we’d likely have to take taxes overall. That would probably be even worse for poor people.

Personally I just hate that I have to go on the roads with the poors to avoid the surveilance that powers the toll roads.

These are not commonly called "slip roads" nor "feeder roads" — they're actually called frontage roads.

New Jersey solved this: just put up signs saying “you’re on a toll road, go check what you owe and pay later”. No toll plaza!

Then when you forget, which you 100% will if you’re not dealing with it frequently, or just reasonably assume they’ll send you a bill—ta-da! First communication they send is a nastygram assessing an extra $50 for every toll you forgot to go beg to pay when you got home.

Ingenious way to screw non-locals, and no toll plazas needed!

I dont like privatized highways or HOV, but...people still have toll roads? Georgia and Florida and surrounding states have electronic passes and pay by toll if you dont have that.

I have thrown coins into a bucket in at least 15 years.

The vast majority of the tolling infrastructure no longer uses plazas. In California and in Texas, the tech exists to prevent you from even noticing. That's not deployed everywhere, especially in areas where they do rate-limiting, like the Bay Bridge, where they need you to slow down and stop when the bridge traffic gets too high, but most areas you wouldn't even notice.

This is also causing problems with people using fake plates and magnetized plates. There's an entire growing industry around it. We're going to have to eventually start requiring some kind of transponder that repeats your plate number for sensors that can't be trivially covered... or you know... just raise the gas tax.

https://youtube.com/shorts/HTVBMPGvZJw

https://youtube.com/shorts/lKXv_bA4lYs

>. Regardless of whether there are tolls or a higher gas tax, the current suburban development pattern is going to get more and more expensive for the end users, but you could have learned that from Strong Towns a decade ago.

We incentivize density in this country by having a ton of compliance hoops that increase cost on a per-building basis. People might just decide that they love suburbs so much that they vote for politicians who tell the Strong Towns crowd, the environmentalists and the trades and engineering groups to shove it and we go back to the 1980s and slap up street after street of chap AF single family homes on septic with nary a site plan in site.

> The point of the article is that you're paying one way or another.

Sure, but the point of a regressive vs. progressive tax is who bears the brunt.

Public transit systems are only effective in highly-dense, urban settings.

Toll roads are often not within dense urban cities - usually on the outskirts, suburbs, highways, bridges and more. Public transit simply doesn't work in these places because of how large and spread-out the US is.

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.

If we could solve transportation for 75% of the U.S., I would be pleased.

I always get confused by people saying public transportation makes no sense for rural people. I think it makes more sense, provided you use the right kind of public transportation for the right kind of rural community.

A large, spread-out community? Perhaps not so much.

But a small town where 80% of the people commute to surrounding cities? That'd be a great case for 1 or more commuter train, depending on direction and demand.

The cycle would have broken in 2008 if we hadn't bailed out the auto manufacturers. Pro-free market until the moment it counts.

Women and children aren’t inherently dangerous. If you just avoid eye contact and keep to yourself, you should be fine

This is just simply not true, not if you compare apples to apples. Cars are the most dangerous form of transportation and nothing even comes close. You're 100x more likely to die in a car above the subway in NYC than on the subway. Thats not an exaggeration, that's the actual figure.

And then people invariably talk about theft or getting beat up, forgetting that most car accidents don't kill, they injure. And they're extremely expensive.

Cars might FEEL safer because you're in a little box away from everyone else. But it's the exact same everyone else. Still the same amount of crazies and sociopaths.

Except now, they're also in little steel boxes that weight 2,000 pounds going faster than any human was ever meant to go. And they're in full control.

Must not be enough cops to either stand around and do nothing or beat the wrong guy to death then.

Ah yes thr classic "the homeless are ruining my day!" argument.

The issue here isn't the homeless; it's that the infrastructure designed to help the homeless (shelters, reeducation programs, free home address programs, and so forth) are either nonexistent or underfunded.

Don't blame the homeless for the problems of your society; blame the problems of your society for the homeless.

The regressiveness issue of tolls is effectively a nitpick compared to the broader more comprehensive issue of how to we create an affordable transportation system for the working class and how do we raise the revenue to fund that through taxes.

The dominant automobile oriented transportation system is very unaffordable and requires high costs of entry. The best thing we can do to make transportation more affordable in general is giving people more options aside from the car. Taxing the wealthy in order to raise revenue for public transportation and active transportation options dominates any sort of regressiveness issues around road tolls and less traffic makes buses more effective.

This is just a general argument against constant prices for everything though. Charging $1/lb for bananas is regressive. Charging $3/gallon for gas is regressive. Charging $10 for a t-shirt is regressive. Etc...

Correct.

Tolls are a regressive tax on the working class. The rich don't even need to use the roads as much because they have other people delivering for them. When they need the road system, the tolls are nothing to them.

The working class, which are generally required to be driving to survive, are left holding the bag for tolls. In places with bad public transit, tolls are just a forced wealth transfer from working class to private firms managing the tolls.

If you have two lanes and want three lanes, you could build the third as public, or as toll. If you build as public, it comes out of taxes, such as the gas tax. If you don’t have enough public money, perhaps you increase the tax. If you build it as toll, you can bond the construction and pay for it with tolls.

At least in theory, this means the toll lane accomplishes the same total road throughput, but shifts the entire cost of its construction to its users instead of depleting public funds. It then appears regressive, but is arguably progressive.

Or if there are practical, affordable, alternatives.

If there is low cost public transit available, then a toll could be an incentive to use public transit instead of driving. But if there is no other viable transportation option, then it is effectively just a regressive tax.

Edited because I admit original statement below is incorrect.

"You could say they are a flat tax since every driver pays the same per usage. You could even argue it is a progressive tax since richer people use toll roads more. The only way you CAN'T describe a toll is a regressive tax. Words have meaning."

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.

Most states include higher tag fees for EVs. I pay way more in the EV fee than I would have paid in gas taxes considering I don’t drive that much. Trucks and other heavy users dwarf car traffic by far though, and those extra logistic costs (if charged by weight) would show up as increased cost of goods.

There are several states that have an EV registration surcharge that replaces gas tax. It's not popular with the pro-EV crowd.

I'm not sure that use taxes really support road maintenance, at least in my state. The reason is that money is fungible, and the income from use taxes can be offset by a reduction in support from the general fund.

The UK is creating a new pay-per-mile EV duty from 2028 to fix this.

Require housing in certain places? Now that's what I'd call broken economics. If there is such a need for housing near job centers...why wouldn't that automatically create the incentive to build it? (Hint: It does; the problem is that in most places there are "requirements" that make it nearly impossible to build new housing. Texas is notable in that it lacks the worst extremes of this problem, hence the recent trends in rent in Austin).

Nah. Roads, specifically giant limited access highways through urban cities cost lots money to build. it makes perfect sense for them to be funded by user fees. Urban land is at a premium, if you want to utilize it you have to pay for it. Mass transit is a much more space efficient way to move people in urban environments, and encourages people to walk more in their daily life which has tons of health benefits. Also transit really help urban air quality (even electric cars cause air quality issues because of the rubber tires)

Why would they need tolls for that? They have your phone location, they have you on number plate readers which don’t require tolls.

100%. All of this.

With a side of handing off management and a slice of the revenue to private entities. With minimum revenue guarantees that then act as a disincentive to improving nearby roadways.

Fwiw in the Bay Area I thought it was a private company but turns out it’s government run with Fastrak operated by The Bay Area Transportation Authority (BATA) in partnership with The California Department of Transportation and The California Highway Patrol (not sure why CHP is involved but they probably get some kickback of the revenue stream in exchange for some enforcement).

But a tax is not targeted to where the usage occurs. Tolls allowed highways with more usage to get more revenue to save up for the more frequent maintenance.

What do you mean by “the economics” here? I barely drive but I have a toll transponder, I set it up once and haven’t thought about it since.

Each additional lane has less and less impact because of lane switching. Ultimately, you can still only enter or exit on the left or right, regardless of if you have 100 lanes. And having people move across 100 lanes to exit is much slower than moving across one or two.

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

I don’t know why this is downvoted, obviously more lanes increase throughput else we wouldn’t do it.

So you mean if we dont socialize the up-front cost plus the ongoing externalities, roads aren't economically sensible choice? That seems less like a problem and more like the beginning of a nice reflection...

I think perhaps my professor was talking about adding tolls explicitly as a traffic congestion relief mechanism rather than a way to recoup cost of maintaining the roadway

Not literally exponentially, but the damage is proportional to the FOURTH power of the axle load. Imagine how expensive shipping would've become overnight if all these trucks had to pay their fair share and passed the costs to their customers.

Honda Civic weighs 0.7t per axle, or 0.24tttt of wear.

F-150 weighs 0.9t per axle, or 0.65tttt of wear.

A school bus weighs 7.5t per axle, or 3164tttt of wear. That's more than thirteen thousand Honda Civics' worth of road damage. Imagine the driver of the Honda had to pay 1c per mile. The school bus would have to pay $130 per mile. Yes, it's carrying 78 passengers, so the cost would be $1.67 per mile per student, but I think most people would just drive their kids to school.

> A honda civic barely does anything to a road. Where a semi-truck is EXPONENTIALLY more damaging.

Similarly, a Honda Civic is ~360 million times more damaging to the road than a bicycle, according to the fourth power law.

No reasonable fee structure should let car drivers use roads for free.

And that's before we get into the amount of valuable public land car drivers use for personal storage.

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).

The means of collection and treatment of it as something other than tax revenue are problematic for sure. Those should be solvable problems, though.

Your point about semi-truck damage vs lighter vehicles is exactly why I think moving in that direction is so useful. The most fair taxation would accurately take both that aspect and actual miles driven into account.

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.

I’ve never been on a public bus and thought, “this is great!”. Crowded, dirty, and almost always there is someone on drugs or experiencing psychosis. I’ll stick to my car.

So let them? I fail to see the problem here.

A good analogy is a queue. Imagine a society of mostly-identical people. You set up a stand that offers free sandwiches, but you can only give the sandwich to one person a minute. What will happen? A line will form outside your stand, growing longer until the length of the line is such that the discomfort of waiting in line is equal to the pleasure of eating the sandwich. So even though your sandwiches are supposedly free, a cost is still imposed on everyone who wants one, because they have to waste time standing in line.

You're right that people who can defer traveling to avoid traffic jams and congestion already tend to do so. But there are still people at the margin. People who don't value their time or don't mind sitting in traffic listening to the radio or dislike taking the bus. These people are creating congestion, imposting a cost on everyone else, and paying nothing for it. They would do it less if they had to pay. (It's okay for people to drive and sit in traffic, there's just no reason it should be free!) So it would really be more like "Good news! Surge pricing is in effect, and today your commute will cost you twice the usual price but take half as long!"

why wouldn't it decrease volume? presumably if it starts costing 100 bucks a day people would stop driving and take these hypothetical buses, no? of course as I mentioned I know this would never actually work for political reasons.

> People already driving generally aren't likely to change their destination

They are if you price it properly. If it costs $1000 to get on that road, a lot of people are going to find alternative means of transport, carpool, or forgo the trip entirely.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We could fund roads (and everything else) using a progressive income tax, so that everyone pays and the wealthiest would pay the largest share.

> If the retort to this is it impacts poorer people more

We've ended up, though, with a growing wealth gap and more tolls.

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.

Taxes on gas?