I have to drive the Mass Pike occasionally. They took out the toll plazas recently, now it’s automated with cameras. It used to be .50 cents for me each way, so $1.00 round trip. Now it costs $2.40 round trip, that’s like 140% increase. So no toll plaza or workers to pay and the price goes up.
Private toll roads are working great here in Mexico. The government signs a contract with Carlos Slim, the well known billionaire. He gets all his permits right away. All revenue from contract signing until 38 years has passed are his, minus his expenses.
The one I know best is Arco Norte, the Mexico City bypass. In the past, I had two choices. Go around through the country for 7 hours to get to a certain point, or drive through Mexico City, with its horrid traffic and corrupt cops and so many days you are not allowed to drive there.
Now, pay like $15 USD, and in two or three hours, way north of Mexico City.
He has done other toll roads, but I have never used them. They would not have been built in any other manner. Give him a chance at profit and things get done very smoothly.
I haven’t heard of any environmentalists laying in the road in front of his bulldozers. They may have done so, but the dozers did not stop.
Arco Norte they finished very quickly, and got it running. Immediately, they went back and started fixing what wasn’t done correctly, with a lot of construction places. Slim knows how to get things done fast, and well.
On the local news this evening they’re reporting that the Turnpike Authority is erroneously billing people for use of the turnpikes with cars they no longer own.
Once a car is sold here the title is signed and that’s it; away goes the buyer with car, title, and existing plates.
Some are blowing through the PikePass terminals without a valid PP and it’s catching the plates. Apparently the buyers are not bothering to register the vehicles in their names. The former owners are now being hit for those toll fees. And the TP Authority demands “proof” the seller no longer has the car.
One guy started out at 1.60 and began the argument with the TP Authority. It’s now up to 40 bucks and change and he’s still fighting with them over the false charges.
We went through Chicago enough that I just got the IPass device that sits in the windshield. Piece of cake and just drive right on by plus the rates are about half what they would be if you paid cash and its good for all the the toll roads heading east and south until about Florida. If you trade cars though, you have to go update your records to take the old one off and put the new one one, plus you have to have the transponder in the windshield so it would be tough to get charged for someone else. When it gets down to $10 or so, they automatically dump another $30 in my account from my CC.
As an aside Sioux City was ticketing a lot of South Dakota cars with their speed cameras. Finally South Dakota refused to give Iowa the registration information so they had no idea who was driving the car and where to send the ticket. Three cheers.
Not for EZpass. I traded in 3 years ago, kept the same EZpass, no problems.
IPass works with EZPass but the make, model, and plate is recorded on your account record. You keep the same transponder when trading but update the records to show the new vehicle. So yeah the transponder still works, but it would be linked to a non existent vehicle.
@ChrisTruck, maybe the state is finally charging toll road users what it actually costs to maintain the road, rather than charging all tax payers for upkeep through income taxes.
Actually, the state probably hasn’t caught up to the full cost. Expect further cost increases every year or two until the tolls pay to maintain the road. Maryland just started doing that. There hadn’t been a toll increase in something like 20 years. The state increased tolls a lot in the first round, and will continue to increase the toll every few years. They did the same thing with gas tax. I’m not excited about tax increases, but at least I know where the money goes. It is much harder to track when it goes into the general fund. In case you are wondering what happens to the income taxes when tolls and gas taxes increase, they actually go down. Maryland has to plan for a balanced budget, and expenditures usually are cut to keep state income taxes from getting out of hand.
Like I said I’m not a big fan of toll roads but at least the money doesn’t get bled off for bike trails and trains. Way back when Minnesota first adopted the gas tax, AAA gave their support provided the money was only used for roads-back about 1930 or so. They foresaw what often happens when there is a pool of money and hungry politicians to spend it. It has gotten watered down some since then but still most goes for roads.
Now on to the feds. MNDot is starting another 4 year project on I 35 in Minneapolis to add capacity and remove some of the bottlenecks. Problem is by “adding capacity” they mean a HOV lane and transit stations. Uggg. These are fed requirements. Of course you can use the HOV lane if you pay a fee/tax/toll. A rose by any other name is still a rose.
You can also use the HOV lane if there are two or more people in the car and avoid the toll. Otherwise it is just a toll road and not an HOV lane.
Yeah that’s the sillyness of the whole HOV idea. I paid for it once, why should I pay again just because I don’t have anyone to ride with me? And if the HOV lanes were clogged with users, they wouldn’t be able to allow toll payers to also use it. The whole HOV thing is a fed farce like the half empty mass transit buses. I 35 was great for a week when they put the additional lane in and then immediately bogged down again when they made it HOV due to fed requirements a week later.
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I was in LA for a business meeting. I car pooled with another team member and we drove from El Segundo to Huntington Beach on the I-5 in the HOV lane. The lane moved fairly well, but the other lanes were stopped. We did this two days in a row with the same results. In many cases, HOV lanes work. I’m not enthusiastic about singles buying access though.
Another problem with automatic tolls (cameras) recently. Numerous people were getting tickets for running the automatic toll lanes without EZPass transponders… in places they’d never been.
It turns out that numerous vanity plates were being incorrectly entered into the database. If (for example) someone had a vanity plate that read +namvet+ because “namvet” wasn’t available when they got their plates, and they ran the toll, the guy with the plate “namvet” was getting the ticket. An investigation showed this as happening often, and most people simply paid the ticket, having used the road as well, but legally with a transponder. The system apparently wasn’t properly beta tested.
Of course HOV lanes work for those that are allowed to use them, but ask why that is? Because there aren’t that many people that can make use of them. So one lane is under utilized while the other normal lanes are backed up. Please please explain how that makes sense when it was the same dollars paying for all of the lanes? I understand the eternal push to car pool, van pool, take the bus, take the train, bike, and don’t drive. I was in charge of organizing the van pools at work and it was quite at task. The point is, it’s a demand thing. There is a demand for people driving cars regardless of what the folks with urban planning degrees think and we collect money to provide the means for those drivers. It’s just reality versus fantasy, but we love fantasy.
Its not even that big a deal to me, it’s more like how can these people fall for this with a straight face?
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OR has a solution available for this problem. The DMV website has a fillable Release of Liability form. When you sell or otherwise dispose of a vehicle just fill and submit the form online and you are no longer liable for it.
California has the same system, and I use it carefully. But, when I sold a car last year and filed that form, I got a toll bill a couple of months later. It turns out I neglected to take the plate number off my Fastrack (toll transponder) account so it rang it up. I guess the Fastrack computer and the DMV computer don’t exchange information. Oh well, live and learn.
If you understand the car pool effort to take traffic off the road, why did you ask the question? There’s no hidden agend, just the desire to reduce air pollution and speed traffic along in large metro areas.
Maybe cars with 4 occupants could get a pass at toll booths to encourage car pooling.
Ipass does not bill you, but if you miss paying a toll you can pay it online.
Here’s one more reason @Rod_Knox may not have been billed. Most tollroads in Texas now have no toll booths, just scanners and cameras. You either have the chip and it’s billed to your account, or they bill you directly (it’s call “Zipcash”). Since an out of state car has no option to stop and pay the toll, they’re breaking no regs by driving through. Maybe that’s why other states aren’t willing to turn over the car info, since the driver did nothing wrong…
I’m not a big central government guy but gee whiz, can’t these devices be universally read? We do a lot of Minnesota to Ohio trips so I have the I Pass transponder that is good going east and quite a ways south. Its not good in Minnesota though so that would mean another transponder. Then in Florida, they have their own system and if you don’t have their transponder you better make sure where you get off takes cash. Now you say Texas has another system? And I assume California is an island on their own also? The feds regulate everything else on the highway, can’t they spec transponders for tolls that can be read on all the systems?? I mean my debit card works in Texas too when I swipe it. Shouldn’t standardization be a major federal goal? Maybe too focused on HOV lanes.