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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
This seems out of touch and without sources. What’s with everyone’s love for strawmanning the poor?
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."
This is completely incorrect. A flat tax has a constant tax rate, which is why it's often referred to as a "proportional tax." Under a true flat tax system, everyone pays the same percentage of their income.
A toll is absolutely regressive because the burden it imposes is constant, irrespective of income; poorer individuals will pay a proportionally higher percentage of their income than wealthier counterparts. As income increases the "effective rate" asymptotically approaches zero, which is regressive by definition.
If you read the literature[1], they're regressive - less regressive than sales tax, but still regressive despite being utilized more by higher income drivers.
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.
Which may already be a sign of ability to pay? Not that I will argue against the right of US Americans to have a country that gets more and more divided by "class" defined by money, an interesting if not very ethical experiment for sure.
The very well-known in Germany satiric news website "Der Postillion" had an interesting provocative piece just yesterday (German, but auto-translate takes care of that): https://www.der-postillon.com/2023/12/weihnachtsmann-ungerec... -- "Schlimmer Verdacht: Bevorzugt der Weihnachtsmann die Kinder reicher Eltern?" ("A disturbing suspicion: Does Santa Claus favor the children of wealthy parents?")
Being able to get to places by car is one of the most basic needs in the US. I think it leads to cementing the monetary status quo and monetary class affiliation when that becomes even more dependent on how much money one can spend on it. A nicer car being more expensive is fine in that regard, it does not get you from A to B much or any faster than the cheap one. Being able to choose roads or lanes that will take you there much faster is different.
It removes one's personal "hard work" contribution to success if more and more of it is out of your control - after all, how much money you start the game of life with is nothing one has control over. Maybe making that kind of mechanism worse is not the best idea in the long term. Unless we are really aiming for what all the dystopia movies and anime have been showing us.
There are also tons and tons of indirect effects. For example, I would make the claim that wealthy shareholders benefit a lot more from roads than poor people, even when they don't drive, since the companies they own and the entire economy needs them. The poorer people driving to work "paying their share" does not look so clearly justified to me, unless one believes that their salaries are perfect indications of their role in value creation.
We have removed all tolls here in Nova Scotia,including for small car ferry's ,
were not rich or populous,but are building out our infrastructure bit by bit to facilitate ease of transport and the prevention of accidents and traffic jams.
The other thing they added are info signs accross the main hyways comming in, giving
times for the main transit routes, making it easy to redirect , 45 MIN!, yikes! sounds like coffee and grocerie shopping to me!
It has realy made a huge difference getting around the city and has opened up options for travelling rural routes that have ferries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thing is, I suspect the taxing is inefficient. I would guess guessing 1% of it goes to mitigating traffic, pollution and road damage.
I think most people will just be burdened by it.
I think taxes would be a more efficient way of collecting these fees, and ensuring they go to fund mass transit in a way that traffic/pollution/road damage was mitigated directly and the people were still served.
Like all "economically sound" ideas, people fuck it up. To the drivers, its one more reminder of a government taxing you on a day to day basis, locking up the roads taxes paid for, for another series of taxes.
Chicago is the poster child here. Constant rate hikes. Diverted funds meant to maintain the roads going elsewhere. "Temporary" tolls that become "permanent", etc.
Problem is, it’s not a tax. It’s a handout to private companies that take advantage of taxpayers fronting the construction cost in a lot of cases. We had one here paid for by tax payers but then leased to a company for some low dollar amount and they keep most of the money.
It’s just another form of rent seeking.
Now, gov run tolls seem like a good idea in areas where congestion needs to be managed. But also needs to be careful not to be a secret tax on the poor.
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.
Yeah nice in theory but the reality is far from this.
In order to implement tolls, you need several components involving middlemen. This includes frontend software, backend, payment processing, transponder management, all the hardware involved, support staff, sometimes toll station staff, among other things.
These toll companies are often owned by foreign companies that are in it for the long haul, offering sweet deals up front then gradually charging more and more with no end in sight, as roads diminish in quality and rest stops fall into disarray.
Toll roads are a scam, a regressive tax on the working class, and downright immoral. We should not limit the mobility of people.
Toll collection used to be much worse in terms of collection efficiency (revenue-cost)--perhaps 50% as I understand it. With all the automated toll booths I assume it's much better today.
Don't they charge you more if you do pay-by-plate though? I always see signs that have a price with local ez-pass, a higher price with out-of-state ez-pass, and an even higher price for pay-by-plate.
25 cents for me. I can get a sticker for $5 sticker that negates that (no transponder I think for Seattle’s first
520 bridge, maybe for carpools?). Oh, supposedly the sticker is a transponder, so I can save 25 cents if I buy a $5 sticker. Even though I don't use the bridge that often, it makes sense to buy.
Ez pass billing is all over the place, each state/authority does whatever it wants.
If you reg a secondary car’s plate to an ezpass account without using the transponder, a lot of states will just think it was a read fail and charge you the regular rate but it depends.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The US interstates move military equipment across the country without needing to deal with railroad bottlenecks. It is a public good. Just like GPS, it has ancillary civic functions but it still serves its original purpose.
I'm not aware of any public schools in my area that would allow me to, e.g., use the basketball court or soccer field after school hours or on the weekends.
Have you tried? I've certainly been able to. And I'm definitely not alone in having used those facilities. I've used them personally and for ad-hoc sport events (lacrosse isn't exactly popular in the area I'm in right now).
Not recently, though I have observed locked doors and gates that make it pretty difficult to use. If your caveat is you need to call ahead to organize an event that's a pretty different use-case from what I'd like to do, which is to use them very casually and occasionally.
> you can definitely use school facilities after hours
Aside from a few things like some playgrounds shared with public parks next door this has often been pretty untrue. I've definitely had police escort me off school basketball courts when school isn't in session, the natatoriums haven't had much public access, it's not like the school libraries are open after hours, etc.
I'm sure some places are more open and some are less open, I wouldn't say you can "definitely" use them.
I'd argue there should be some access to school facilities by the public if you want to call them "public". Otherwise it's about as public as the police department.
Necessary public infrastructure that is paid for with tax dollars is not a public good?
And just in case this fact is being lost / forgotten: Toll roads are primarily, originally funded through tax dollars but are disingenuously structured in a way these bozos can go "see, it's not actually tax dollars" (it is). The same exact dollars that should be used to build fully public, free roads are instead used to privatize public infrastructure.
There has never been a time where a toll raid has failed and the losses were treated as private. The bonds magically get repaid (to the right people, of course).
It's all tax dollars in the end, one way or another.
"Public good" is a term of art in economics which means a good is both non-excludable (it is impractical to control who benefits from it) and non-rivalrous (one person benefiting does not prevent others from also benefiting).
Roads are clearly rivalrous and while it's often impractical to prevent non-payers from entering a toll road, one can certainly record them and met penalties after the fact to discourage it.
> Toll roads are primarily, originally funded through tax dollars
This is untrue of all the toll roads I've regularly driven in multiple cities in the US. Their construction was funded through bonds which are paid back from the toll revenues.
why did you ignore my other statements that expressly address this "viewpoint."
The bonds are issued either by the authority itself or some other agency expressly delegated to issue those bonds.
The accounting is done EXPRESSLY with the knowledge of the states general fund, even though there's a "wink wink" don't use the tax dollars to """directly""" pay for these bonds.
Don't believe me? Look at the financial reports yourself.
There is zero point in the fuzzy accounting other than to make something that simply should be public, private, and allow grifters to make a buck or two off it.
In EVERY CASE of a failed toll road the major bond holders have all been made whole through the state directly or indirectly.
If you have the money, investing in a toll road is the easiest way to make lots of money with 0 risk.
But you can only do that if the entity issues those bonds "knows" and "selects" you. :)
I have for the toll roads I drive on. It shows the debt payments being paid by the toll revenues, not other state taxes.
> In EVERY CASE of a failed toll road the major bond holders have all been made whole through the state directly or indirectly.
Sure, the toll agencies are ultimately a creature of the state but it's incorrect (a lie?) to argue it's funded primarily, originally through tax dollars. What's the rate of these failures? What's the actual percentage of these bonds being paid by toll revenues versus failing and the states being on the hook? Once again you said it's primarily and originally. Being paid because the bond failed to be paid back by toll revenues isn't the original payment plan, and unless it's happening most of the time it's not the primary way of those bonds being paid.
> make something that simply should be public, private
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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://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-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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
[delayed]
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.
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.
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.
The rich may travel on the toll roads, but they certainly benefit from those who do.
> 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.
This seems out of touch and without sources. What’s with everyone’s love for strawmanning the poor?
If you don't have a contradicting source, your response is just whining.
Toll roads are good economics. If a choice has negative externalities (more traffic, more pollution, road damage), tax it.
They're a prime sign of broken economics.
The people who can least afford to move closer to their jobs are the ones who are regressively taxed in time, energy, and money the most.
They are very regressive unless there are income-based credits, which adds administrative complexity.
Rich people pay the tolls without a second thought. For the poor they are yet another obstacle to trying to make ends meet.
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."
This is completely incorrect. A flat tax has a constant tax rate, which is why it's often referred to as a "proportional tax." Under a true flat tax system, everyone pays the same percentage of their income.
A toll is absolutely regressive because the burden it imposes is constant, irrespective of income; poorer individuals will pay a proportionally higher percentage of their income than wealthier counterparts. As income increases the "effective rate" asymptotically approaches zero, which is regressive by definition.
Good point, I've edited my comment to clarify that it is incorrect
If you read the literature[1], they're regressive - less regressive than sales tax, but still regressive despite being utilized more by higher income drivers.
https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/16892
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.
All the statistics I've been able to find point to higher toll road usage among higher income people, not less.
Which may already be a sign of ability to pay? Not that I will argue against the right of US Americans to have a country that gets more and more divided by "class" defined by money, an interesting if not very ethical experiment for sure.
The very well-known in Germany satiric news website "Der Postillion" had an interesting provocative piece just yesterday (German, but auto-translate takes care of that): https://www.der-postillon.com/2023/12/weihnachtsmann-ungerec... -- "Schlimmer Verdacht: Bevorzugt der Weihnachtsmann die Kinder reicher Eltern?" ("A disturbing suspicion: Does Santa Claus favor the children of wealthy parents?")
Being able to get to places by car is one of the most basic needs in the US. I think it leads to cementing the monetary status quo and monetary class affiliation when that becomes even more dependent on how much money one can spend on it. A nicer car being more expensive is fine in that regard, it does not get you from A to B much or any faster than the cheap one. Being able to choose roads or lanes that will take you there much faster is different.
It removes one's personal "hard work" contribution to success if more and more of it is out of your control - after all, how much money you start the game of life with is nothing one has control over. Maybe making that kind of mechanism worse is not the best idea in the long term. Unless we are really aiming for what all the dystopia movies and anime have been showing us.
There are also tons and tons of indirect effects. For example, I would make the claim that wealthy shareholders benefit a lot more from roads than poor people, even when they don't drive, since the companies they own and the entire economy needs them. The poorer people driving to work "paying their share" does not look so clearly justified to me, unless one believes that their salaries are perfect indications of their role in value creation.
Tolls and public transit fares are regressive.
We have removed all tolls here in Nova Scotia,including for small car ferry's , were not rich or populous,but are building out our infrastructure bit by bit to facilitate ease of transport and the prevention of accidents and traffic jams. The other thing they added are info signs accross the main hyways comming in, giving times for the main transit routes, making it easy to redirect , 45 MIN!, yikes! sounds like coffee and grocerie shopping to me! It has realy made a huge difference getting around the city and has opened up options for travelling rural routes that have ferries.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The UK is creating a new pay-per-mile EV duty from 2028 to fix this.
Thing is, I suspect the taxing is inefficient. I would guess guessing 1% of it goes to mitigating traffic, pollution and road damage.
I think most people will just be burdened by it.
I think taxes would be a more efficient way of collecting these fees, and ensuring they go to fund mass transit in a way that traffic/pollution/road damage was mitigated directly and the people were still served.
Like all "economically sound" ideas, people fuck it up. To the drivers, its one more reminder of a government taxing you on a day to day basis, locking up the roads taxes paid for, for another series of taxes.
Chicago is the poster child here. Constant rate hikes. Diverted funds meant to maintain the roads going elsewhere. "Temporary" tolls that become "permanent", etc.
It's bad, stop the madness.
I agree. I don't like toll roads, but I recognize that they only charge me for using them, because my use isn't necessarily good for everybody else.
Gas taxes also work (ignoring electric vehicles), but paying a specific amount for a specific road certainly seems more direct.
Problem is, it’s not a tax. It’s a handout to private companies that take advantage of taxpayers fronting the construction cost in a lot of cases. We had one here paid for by tax payers but then leased to a company for some low dollar amount and they keep most of the money.
It’s just another form of rent seeking.
Now, gov run tolls seem like a good idea in areas where congestion needs to be managed. But also needs to be careful not to be a secret tax on the poor.
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 the economics of collecting them suck. A tax is a lot easier and much less "enshittifying" the daily experience.
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.
Yeah nice in theory but the reality is far from this.
In order to implement tolls, you need several components involving middlemen. This includes frontend software, backend, payment processing, transponder management, all the hardware involved, support staff, sometimes toll station staff, among other things.
These toll companies are often owned by foreign companies that are in it for the long haul, offering sweet deals up front then gradually charging more and more with no end in sight, as roads diminish in quality and rest stops fall into disarray.
Toll roads are a scam, a regressive tax on the working class, and downright immoral. We should not limit the mobility of people.
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.
Toll collection used to be much worse in terms of collection efficiency (revenue-cost)--perhaps 50% as I understand it. With all the automated toll booths I assume it's much better today.
I don’t even have a toll transponder, OCR these days is good enough to detect your plate number and charge the linked account.
Don't they charge you more if you do pay-by-plate though? I always see signs that have a price with local ez-pass, a higher price with out-of-state ez-pass, and an even higher price for pay-by-plate.
25 cents for me. I can get a sticker for $5 sticker that negates that (no transponder I think for Seattle’s first 520 bridge, maybe for carpools?). Oh, supposedly the sticker is a transponder, so I can save 25 cents if I buy a $5 sticker. Even though I don't use the bridge that often, it makes sense to buy.
Ez pass billing is all over the place, each state/authority does whatever it wants.
If you reg a secondary car’s plate to an ezpass account without using the transponder, a lot of states will just think it was a read fail and charge you the regular rate but it depends.
Yes, bill for plate OCR is typically a lot more expensive in addition to having to logon to a site etc.
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.
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.
>Aren't toll roads the norm?
No. I won't say they're rare but they're not especially common in the US.
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.
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.
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.
demand for transport is not that elastic though
There’s no more toll booths. It’s a big step function change in viability of toll roads.
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.
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.
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.
The US interstates move military equipment across the country without needing to deal with railroad bottlenecks. It is a public good. Just like GPS, it has ancillary civic functions but it still serves its original purpose.
> Can I use the highway if I don’t have a car?
Can I use the schools if I don't have a child?
In the U.S. you can definitely use school facilities after hours (such as the fields, and even some buildings, etc).
The primary concern with not allowing access at any time of day to the general public is of course, the children.
I'm not aware of any public schools in my area that would allow me to, e.g., use the basketball court or soccer field after school hours or on the weekends.
Have you tried? I've certainly been able to. And I'm definitely not alone in having used those facilities. I've used them personally and for ad-hoc sport events (lacrosse isn't exactly popular in the area I'm in right now).
Not recently, though I have observed locked doors and gates that make it pretty difficult to use. If your caveat is you need to call ahead to organize an event that's a pretty different use-case from what I'd like to do, which is to use them very casually and occasionally.
> you can definitely use school facilities after hours
Aside from a few things like some playgrounds shared with public parks next door this has often been pretty untrue. I've definitely had police escort me off school basketball courts when school isn't in session, the natatoriums haven't had much public access, it's not like the school libraries are open after hours, etc.
I'm sure some places are more open and some are less open, I wouldn't say you can "definitely" use them.
I'd argue there should be some access to school facilities by the public if you want to call them "public". Otherwise it's about as public as the police department.
Apparently under your definition of a public good, there's no such thing.
Necessary public infrastructure that is paid for with tax dollars is not a public good?
And just in case this fact is being lost / forgotten: Toll roads are primarily, originally funded through tax dollars but are disingenuously structured in a way these bozos can go "see, it's not actually tax dollars" (it is). The same exact dollars that should be used to build fully public, free roads are instead used to privatize public infrastructure.
There has never been a time where a toll raid has failed and the losses were treated as private. The bonds magically get repaid (to the right people, of course).
It's all tax dollars in the end, one way or another.
"Public good" is a term of art in economics which means a good is both non-excludable (it is impractical to control who benefits from it) and non-rivalrous (one person benefiting does not prevent others from also benefiting).
Roads are clearly rivalrous and while it's often impractical to prevent non-payers from entering a toll road, one can certainly record them and met penalties after the fact to discourage it.
So no, roads are not a public good.
If roads are "rivalrous" then so is literally everything else.
Roads are rivalrous because too many people using them causes a traffic jam. Seriously go read the Wikipedia article on the subject.
> Toll roads are primarily, originally funded through tax dollars
This is untrue of all the toll roads I've regularly driven in multiple cities in the US. Their construction was funded through bonds which are paid back from the toll revenues.
why did you ignore my other statements that expressly address this "viewpoint."
The bonds are issued either by the authority itself or some other agency expressly delegated to issue those bonds.
The accounting is done EXPRESSLY with the knowledge of the states general fund, even though there's a "wink wink" don't use the tax dollars to """directly""" pay for these bonds.
Don't believe me? Look at the financial reports yourself.
There is zero point in the fuzzy accounting other than to make something that simply should be public, private, and allow grifters to make a buck or two off it.
In EVERY CASE of a failed toll road the major bond holders have all been made whole through the state directly or indirectly.
If you have the money, investing in a toll road is the easiest way to make lots of money with 0 risk.
But you can only do that if the entity issues those bonds "knows" and "selects" you. :)
> Look at the financial reports yourself
I have for the toll roads I drive on. It shows the debt payments being paid by the toll revenues, not other state taxes.
> In EVERY CASE of a failed toll road the major bond holders have all been made whole through the state directly or indirectly.
Sure, the toll agencies are ultimately a creature of the state but it's incorrect (a lie?) to argue it's funded primarily, originally through tax dollars. What's the rate of these failures? What's the actual percentage of these bonds being paid by toll revenues versus failing and the states being on the hook? Once again you said it's primarily and originally. Being paid because the bond failed to be paid back by toll revenues isn't the original payment plan, and unless it's happening most of the time it's not the primary way of those bonds being paid.
> make something that simply should be public, private
The toll roads I'm talking about are public.
> address this "viewpoint."
This "viewpoint" is otherwise known as "reality".
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.
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).
https://archive.is/ZvPtX
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.
Very odd, an article about America, but mostly using British spelling except for prices in $.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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://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-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)
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.
I assume automatic tolls via transponders tend to make tolls a lot less transparent in practice.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Taxes on gas?
Unfortunately, it hasn’t seen a big jump in a while, all cars are getting heavier and electrified, and gas mileage is going up.
Odometry tax when you register the vehicle, with tiers based on the curb weight.
Also higher gas taxes for carbon reasons.
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).
Gas is a different shared resource (e.g. it’s effects on air quality/climate change) than road capacity.
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.
The gas tax has never paid for full road maintenance. It's always been subsidized from other funds.
There are still all the roads that aren't toll roads that still need that tax revenue to support.
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).