Are toll roads less of a scam than free roads though? At least toll road construction and maintenance is funded by drivers.
It's a regressive tax, but so are state taxes.
this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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@alcoholicorn It is when it has been privatised to a company that pretty much pays no tax (hi Transurban!), for roads that taxpayers helped to pay for, and those toll roads connect car dependent suburbs that have next to no public transport.
Also when we're told the tolls are to pay for the road, but after the road is paid off, the toll stays....
Roads need to be resurfaced constantly and rebuilt every 30 years or so. You will never finish paying off a road.
Not disagreeing with your core point but infrastructure is never paid off.
Upkeep on a mile of asphalt is way more than I expected and I live somewhere temperate.
You're right, the toll roads should be collected by the government, and the amount collected should be based on income so it's not regressive.
Also, they should be placed every 15 feet, so people stop driving altogether.
People won't stop driving entirely. Some are legitimately afraid of rain, sun, wind, snow, etc . Placing the toll booths every 100m would go a long way to reducing traffic and reducing dangerous vehicle speeds.
Oh yeah, when it's privatized. Here the only former toll road was owned by the county. They removed the toll once the road paid for its construction.
@alcoholicorn Yeah, that's not how it tends to work in Australia.
What happens is a state government puts up a good chunk of time construction costs (as much as half in some cases), plus public land.
In some cases, the freeway already exists, but the state government wants one more lane built, because it thinks that will ease congestion (as happened with sections of the Tullamarine and Monash Freeways in Melbourne).
It gets handed off to Transurban, who builds it under a long-term operating agreement (30 years is common).
In some cases, the agreements have clauses saying railways that compete with the toll road can't be built.
As the end of the lease approaches, Transurban offers to build one more lane — in exchange for extending the agreement.
In Kentucky, back in like 2015, we built a much needed new bridge across the Ohio river with money from the Obama administration.
When construction was almost complete, there started being rumors about tolls. And the city was like "nah, we wouldn't do that". And then a month later they were like "here's how the tolls are going to work".
It's all hired out to a third party that expects to make profit off of it.
And the tolls don't recoup the construction cost, they offset future maintenance costs.
And after a few months in operation, the private firm collecting tolls announced that they weren't making their projected profits, so they were increasing the tolls. It was like $2.50 to cross one way. And it quickly went up from there.
After maybe 6 months they announced that they were having trouble collecting tolls on semi trucks. So they were again raising tolls on cars.
A lot of people have to cross this bridge just to get from their house to their work. So now it's like $6 or $7 per day just to commute.
The private company is awful. There have been people who have transponders on their cars that end up with huge fines and late fees because they get double billed - billed by the transponder and billed by the license plate cameras. It takes hours to get through on a phone call. Their payment website is constantly down. Now they're just telling everybody that it takes months for them to generate your bills so you can't even believe the numbers, or like sometimes they're just randomly billing customers that have transponders for trips they didn't take.
IT IS FUCKING HORRIBLE.
And the "drivers' that should be paying the largest part of the bill - the trucking companies (as their vehicles weight the same as a dozen cars or more) don't pay anything and just people trying to get to work every day have a $200 per month commuting bill that they didn't sign up for when they bought their house on the other side of the river.
And the city is stuck in this contract - where a private company can unilaterally raise rates and overcharge and double bill - and there's nothing you can do about it. I've heard stories of people trying to register their car and finding out it has thousands of dollars in tolls. Buying cars that have thousands of dollars in tolls outstanding that can't be registered until the bills are paid.
And all of this, not to build a bridge. The bridges were built before the toll company even got involved. But just for future maintenance on the bridge.
And the net effect of all of this is that people who live in this city have learned to never use the big beautiful new bridge. Because even if you do everything right, you still get screwed. So all the tolling has done is coerce more people into using the old, outdated, beyond-design-capacity bridges that the new bridge was built to take the load off of. The new bridge is constantly empty and the little two-lane 70 year old bridge next to it is busier than ever.
This shit angers me to no end. Where I live, they built this wonderful highway around the greater metro area. Said it'd be a toll road for 25 years until paid off. We're on year 29 now, because they needed to "update" it.
Then, you find out the tolls are managed by a for-profit company in Saudi Arabia...? The express lanes, that cause more traffic and wrecks than a simple exspansion of lanes, is ran buy a for-profit company, in a foreign country. It makes no sense, unless you're a fan of unregulated capitalism, I guess.
@Meuzzin @ajsadauskas There was the time the motorway tunnel under the river went broke — Brisbane's CLEM7
I like that they take the risk; so conceptually it's a pass from me, but a partial failure when it's a sweetheart deal.
Rail infrastructure is funded by taxes, built by contractors, and the users have to pay each time they use it too. So I have not much sympathy for the precise fact of paying to use a road.
In fact we should be removing lanes — not these, but stroads like Victoria Rd.
@Meuzzin @ajsadauskas City West Link is a complete duplicate of the M4 East — in fact it was a failed prototype, using the M4's original corridor, compromised by cost savings (INSTEAD of tapping that equity market, but anyway …)
So instead of replacing Parramatta Road through the inner west in June 2000, we ended up with a second stroad! Brand new traffic lights in Leichhardt, recommended to drive into the city.
Get rid of it! Close it at Hawthorne Canal.
And rip 4 lanes off Parramatta Rd.
@Meuzzin @ajsadauskas But instead — and I see why they're afraid — Labor are throwing money at road users. Subsidising tolls with tax money, and doing it indirectly (with new paperwork).
The final Liberal premier did a mini-poison-pill by promising not to close any lanes on Parramatta Road. "You have the choice of a free road", great cynicism. You had the choice to remove induced demand, fool.
At least his predecessor designed a transport agenda with non-stroad new roads and metro lines.
I don't like when government funded projects are sold to private corporations. I like government funded infrastructure though.
Toll roads aren't bad, it's all in the details. The problem is that the government is often "captured" and therefore has no incentive to have a fair contract, so they'll add clauses like
- If the company loses money because the government does something, the government will pay them. This often prevents the government from reducing or removing the toll road / other privately owned resource.
- The government can't "compete" with the toll road, either with another road or (sometimes) through public transport.
- The government will often, as a form of pork-barrelling, offer people reimbursements for the toll road usage, thereby funneling tax payer money into the private company.
- Toll roads are tax deductible.
Ideally, toll roads encourage people to take the train.
Usually the details show toll roads are bad. Ideally, toll roads are not needed. Toll roads are a result of failure of government.
It's also a failure of politics. If you tell people you're going to raise taxes to pay for the road, you're probably not getting elected. Toll roads ideally are just another form of tax that is more sneaky than straight up raising taxes.
@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars Everything that's been built with taxpayer money and privatised have been a massive government fraud. The jokes on us apparently.
I avoid those roads now.. Holy shit the new toll system is a shakedown.
I'm a big fan of putting speed cameras everywhere. Let the bad drivers pay for the road.
Speeding is such a lazy scape goat.
If it looks like a tax, feels like a tax, and works like a tax...
You can ride them for free with those plate covers that are dark when viewed from above
That's just what I've read, tho. Personally I just go through tolls for free because I'm not an asshole and I ride a bicycle instead of a car.
You ride a bike on highways?
Yes, of course.