No state income tax, low property taxes, a $0.28 state tax on fuel and a handful of toll roads. Yes, I’d say so. All are electronic and many toll stations can be driven through at full speed.
The tourists help pay for those toll roads but… some are for rather long bridges to get to islands. Sanibel/Captiva to name but one - $6 to get onto the island!! and $2 to take three of the 4 bridges to Cape Coral (one is free) and the magnificent Sunshine Skyway to Tampa is a toll but the view is worth it!
But we don’t have freeze-thaw that tears up pavement but we do have salt air that degrades bridges.
Both sides will/are pointing fingers at the other side, no matter what is being discussed, and both sides have their arguments and sources, and BOTH sides think they are right, for almost every argument, the other side has their experts that can disprove the other side…
So can we STOP with the politics already please???
Does that same thought apply to things like the Navy, fire department, or schools?
Traveling through the country is a privilege and not a right?
Yes. Tolls or taxes, not both. We need a bridge? Charge a toll to use it, and then the toll goes away when it’s paid off. Simple. But don’t tell me you’re going to tax me for roads and then say “Oh, we didn’t tax you enough so we’re charging you more.”
I pay a toll virtually every workday. There’s a congested freeway I drive, but I can use the carpool lane if I pay a few bucks to shave 15 minutes off my commute. It’s optional. I don’t have to pay. But I can’t get behind charging tolls on an interstate or public highway where drivers don’t have another reasonable option. Everyone needs that interstate to be there, so everyone should pay, whether you’re driving on it or not.
Only many? Shouldn’t all toll stations be electronic in this day and age? We have one bridge here that still has a tool booth lane but very few people use it. Most people just pay by mail or through their transponder.
NY and MA have had electronic toll taking for decades. The early systems didn’t have the ability to detect a vehicle going through them over 20mph. NH started electric tolling after NY and MA. We still have some places that have the old system, and your speed is limited to 20mph. The goal is to eliminate these old systems and replace with the more modern ones where you can drive through at highway speeds.
Well, there was a significant effort to block the phasing out of “manned” toll booths. Unions got involved and forced certain compromises to be made. Aside from that, the technology has continued to evolve, making the transition easier and less expensive to implement.
I don’t know about MA, but the NY Thruway only added cashless tolling in the last 3 years or so. Sadly, NJ is lagging with this technology. They are piloting it on the Atlantic City Expressway, and if their system proves to be okay, then it will be expanded to the NJ Turnpike and Garden State Parkway.
The cashless tolling on the NY Thruway utilizes a huge gantry over the entry and exit lanes, and you can drive at normal highway speeds past them.
I have the illinois transponder and toll account. When they started getting rid of the coin toll booths, it was just easier. Otherwise you had to go on line and figure which gates you went through to pay. Even worse with out of state and plate readers. The I’ll transponder is good in many states east and south, not all, but many. I think it’ll even work in Minnesota now. Keep $30 in the account and recharges as needed. Plus the rate is about half with an account. I think it cost close to $100 on a trip to New York, both ways, and just decided the transponder made more sense.
As new states are added though, there does need to be compatibility among the systems.
Yes I know. It’s NH that’s lagging behind. We still have much of the older system where you can only drive 20mph through. NY had that old system too for several decades. Several lanes through the booths were dedicated to cashless transaction with a transponder. We would travel back to NY a lot back in the 80’s and 90’s and into the 2000’s. For a little while you needed 2 transponders to only do cashless transactions going from Boston to Syracuse. MA had their own system that wasn’t compatible with NY’s. They finally switched around 1999. At the time NH was still using tokens. Around 2000 I decided to get a transponder since we used I-90 several times a year going to Syracuse - not so much for the cost, but because those cashless lanes were faster to go through. I looked at getting the EZ-Pass (NY) or Fast-Lane (MA) transponder. At the time MA charged you for their transponder. NY just get it to you as long as you had an account setup. I chose the EZ-Pass. NH finally got into cashless system about 10 years ago using the EZ-Pass system. I gave up my NY EZ-pass transponder and signed up for the NH EZ-pass because residents get a discount.
NH has SOME areas with the gantry over the certain parts of toll areas. Portsmouth tolls - if you’re just passing through you stay in the middle 2 lanes and can pass through at highway speeds. Before they did that I’ve seen lines there that were backed up to the MA border.
The slow toll booth through Bedford NH is extremely dangerous. Every year it seems someone is traveling at a high rate of speed and slams into one of the barriers. The latest one happened just a couple weeks ago. The two human occupants survived, but their dogs didn’t. 2 people seriously injured, 2 dogs killed as minivan slams into N.H. toll plaza
… or into other vehicles that are lined-up to pay tolls.
When toll booths are–inevitably–removed, the accident rate decreases.
When I was much younger, there was a tollbooth on Long Island’s Southern State Parkway that collected 10 cents from each driver. When Hugh Carey became Governor, they discovered that the tiny toll charge didn’t even cover salaries and operating expenses for the toll plaza, so the tollbooths were removed.
I haven’t seen that in NH (but it probably has happened). In the past 3 years there have been at least 3 fatalities at the Bedford Toll booths when someone slammed into the barriers traveling at a high rate of speed. I got caught up in the traffic jam this one caused several years ago.
We have one bridge here that still has a tool booth lane but very few people use it. Most people just pay by mail or through their transponder.