[fuzzfactor]

On the Florida Turnpike it was always too expensive for many students when they traveled up and down the state.

It was bad enough having captive service stations and restaurants for overpriced products, but the toll was and still is ridiculous too, considering it was agreed there would be no toll after the construction was paid for, And it was well paid for decades ago.

Anyway there were only very few exits and they were mostly rural until you got to South Florida where you could get off and on every few miles. The captive service stations needeed to be built at the same time as the Turnpike or everybody would run out of gas back then.

Except Orlando which was a very small city before Disney came in, but their gas stations were still closed late at night and on Sunday.

Tickets were reverse engineered in a completely analog way.

The "main entrance" to the Turnpike coming south was out in the middle of nowhere where the I-75 freeway keeps going to Tampa but you smoothly get over to the main gates of the Turnpike if you want to head down to Miami instead. You would just breeze on through and pick up a ticket at the northernmost gate, and the further you traveled south, the more toll you would have to pay when you got off.

Students would get off of I-75 avoiding the Turnpike and drive on the rural roads about a half-hour until you get to the next Turnpike entrance and pick up a (very valuable) ticket there instead of at the main entrance to the north.

As you got down toward the Palm Beach area, where the northbounders and southbounders still shared the gas stations and restaurants in the central plazas, many northbound travelers would willingly trade tickets from wherever they got on in South Florida for one which will only cost them as much as if they got on at the very last chance before hitting the northernmost exit.

Northbounders would then get off right where they were going to anyway, one exit away from where we got on, and we would get off one exit away from where they got on, and everybody came out ahead, paying the minimum tolls possible.

It took a long time before any toll-takers started looking at the tickets and asking "why did it take 6 hours to only go one exit?"

[Symbiote]

There was a discussion on a different post pointing out that maintenance of a highway is still very costly. Charging only the users, rather than all taxpayers, appears very fair.

[dmurray]

Charging by road use definitely seems fair, but it's a problem when you have 50 major roads in the state and by historical accident only say 2 of them get tolled. North-South travellers end up subsidising East-West travellers or vice versa.

It's hard to come up with a perfectly fair system. Tolling every road is expensive and tax on fuel has its own trade offs.

[sidewndr46]

The irony of this discussion is we're talking about Florida. A place where absolutely no one really should be living in the first place. The eastern seaboard is just a bunch of infilled swamp, which was more valuable as swamp.

[bboygravity]

I've lived in countries with and without toll.

I feel the no toll approach is better.

Most importantly because no toll means (the feeling of) more privacy, toll means you're being tracked. Regardless of law we all know that everything eveywhere gets stored indefinitely independent of country (if not legally then illegally if not by the toll org then by the secret service).

Secondly the country I was in with the toll approach had worse infrastructure.

Thirdly, when looking at government spending as a whole, road infrastructure (in a non tollroad country) is really not that big of an expenditure as far as I know?

Forthly, a country may (and some do) still tax road-users only by just taxing car ownership periodically. No need to invade privacy for that through toll booths or even worse: mandatory tracking devices (countries in Europe are pushing for the latter). Added bonus: you can trivially put a tax on relatively polluting vehicles if you like and use that to subsidize less polluting vehicles.

[lxgr]

Another option is to just tax fuel, which has the nice side effect of being roughly proportionate to actual road usage and pollution.

[ndsipa_pomu]

That would have been better in the past, but doesn't work so well with electric vehicles.

Ideally, vehicles should be charged in relation to approximately the fourth power of their weight as that is proportional to the road damage. However, that will drastically change the economics of logistics companies.

[boosteri]

Not necessarily, but governments would need to be transparent about subsidising logistics.. instead of the current state where this is done covertly by taxing little vehicles disproportionately.

[numbasys]

That's a good point and another reason to encourage it. It would boost rail over road, which makes far more sense.

[mnd999]

Superficially maybe, but it's much more complicated than that. When an efficient public transport exists between two places there are derivative economic benefits all round, a larger pool of employees for businesses in A, more demand for housing in B etc.

[iso1631]

Depends if you think roads should be run as a public service, free to all at the point of use, and paid for by all according to their means, or a private service (with or without profit).

Do you also think the same about parks? Or schools? Or police? Or healthcare? Or water? Or rail? Or defence?

[slavboj]

Infrastructure provides public benefits way in excess of the private benefit to the users, which is why roads have been public projects for millennia. People generally travel on roads to get somewhere and do something, and given increased state capacity, that thing is overwhelmingly likely to be taxable.

Toll roads are a holdover from times of reduced state capacity when the best and only way to tax something was to force it to go through a physical chokepoint.

[userabchn]

If the thing they use the infrastructure to do is actually valuable, then they can just add the cost of the toll to what they charge for doing it. Splitting the cost of building and maintaining infrastructure among users is, I believe, the fairest way, and helps to avoid market distortions.

[alistairSH]

Maybe, except it’s a regressive tax.

They don’t call HOV/toll lanes “Lexus Lanes” for nothing.

[mattigames]

As much as charging only the victims of crimes to pay for police expenses rather than all taxpayers appears very fair.

[borski]

So you never get anything delivered on a FedEx or ups truck? And you don’t receive mail?

[Kwpolska]

Shipping services are not free? FedEx/UPS pay the tolls, and the shipping fees I pay should reimburse them for that.

[Symbiote]

Since I live on the Danish island of Zealand, everything transported from more than about 150km away has paid a toll of some kind -- either the bridge toll from the rest of Denmark (and thence Germany), the bridge/tunnel toll to Sweden, or the ferry to Germany.

I'm fine with that. FedEx's lorry will pay 960DKK (€130) to cross the bridge, and they will add that price to the price of delivery.

[gambiting]

Exactly - you benefit from infrastructure existing, even if you personally don't drive on every single road in the country.

[reustle]

I used to live in the US and currently live in Japan. We pay around $95 to go about 5 hours on a highway from Tokyo to Kyoto, for example. 3~ hours north is about $35. I think this more accurately charges us drivers for the resources we consume.

[johnwalkr]

I was also going to mention Japan. All highways are tolled and Japan also has virtually zero street parking, and free parking is mostly limited to private lots owned by stores. Of course, the more rural a place you go, the less this generalization is true.

Even if you already own a car, it is in general more expensive, inconvenient and maybe even slower to choose to drive to work. As a general rule of thumb, driving long distances costs about the same as taking the shinkansen for one person, is slower and makes more sense once you have 3+ people in the car.

I think overall this is fair and leads to much better outcomes than US-style "it's my right to drive and park for free where ever I go, but I will fight any proposal to improve or subsidize transit because 'my taxes!'".

[sidewndr46]

From an outsider's perspective this actually appears to be a happy medium. You can do most normal things without the need for a vehicle or the costs incurred. But if in your free time you want to take some trip to the middle of nowhere the possibility of that still exists.

[andrepd]

Hit the nail on the head. If only my country followed that model x)

[dandy23]

It's similar in France, maybe half that number though. It's a good system. The one's who use the highways pay for them. The highways are in a very good state in France.

[VK538FY]

The relatively high fees on French autoroutes are offset by the good quality, yes. But the principal objection may be the way in which said autoroutes were privatized after being built with public money, no?

[ornornor]

Yes but it was long ago and people forgot. But yes, French citizens are paying for the autoroutes twice: built with public money and then again with tolls to use them.

[iso1631]

Presumably the privatisation process involved the transfer of cash from the companies buying them to the government, and hopefully that was more than the cost of construction.

[jonwinstanley]

Sure, you may multiple times but they don't just get built once either. There is non-stop maintenance for a road system.

[iso1631]

There's maintenence in local roads too. And maintence is broadly relative to the damage caused, which is relative to the 4th power of axel weight. A 30 ton truck will cause thousands of times the damage of a 2 ton car, but doesn't pay thousands of times the price.

[fuzzfactor]

You may be right about the resources but that's pretty steep, between 10 and 20 dollars per hour and I would think that highly discourages workers earning hourly wages of that amount or less from traveling that way very much.

In Houston about $95 per month was about all the market could stand to commute on a modern 21st century tollway. Once it got over $100 it looked to me like it was beginning to become possible for an elected official to get in based on a promise to reduce or eliminate the tolls. I don't think that's been an issue yet but the tolls have recently been reduced for the first time ever.

Actually it's the unseen waste of resources that discourages me from driving any more than necessary, rather than the cost to me of operating a vehicle.

[kevinh456]

What's the condition of the road like? I assume that it is immaculate.

[reustle]

I also ride motorcycles here. They’re fantastic.

[paganel]

It also adds to the price of food that gets transported from one place to another, and, as such, acts as a regressive tax on people who pay the biggest part of their income on their basic needs (like food). That's one of the main reasons why I don't get the "death to cars!" movement and why I regard it as mostly middle-class privileged discourse: no cars means fewer or worst roads, means food being a lot more expensive.

[snordgren]

Road transport of goods accounts for a majority of wear on the roads. Rail is naturally more cumbersome because railroads are less ubiquitous than roads, but it is much more efficient in terms of both energy usage and labor.

If we subsidize road transport by letting tax payers or commuters pay for their road wear and tear, we end up with more road transport at the cost of more labor and more energy use. That's deadweight loss caused by the government distorting the market with road subsidies.

Road transport should be used where its flexibility gives it a competitive advantage, not be the default because taxpayers subsidize it.

One way to compensate lower-income earners for higher food prices is to lower taxes for those with low incomes, making the tax rate more progressive. Another is to reduce VAT for basic needs products like food.

[erpellan]

A truck can carry 10 or 20 times more cargo than a car. The truck toll is not 20x more.

The movement to reduce car use is about replacing them with better alternatives such as efficient local public transport and high speed rail, not going back to travelling on horseback.

[paganel]

> The truck toll is not 20x more.

Yes, that was my exact point. The car owners (of which I'm one) subsidise cheaper food for many not car-owners (many of them, presumably, poorer people) by paying more expensive road tolls relative to our vehicles' sizes. And that's good.

Make road toll for trucks commensurate to the real wear they're adding to the roads then you're increasing the price of food (by increasing the cost of transporting said food), hence you're making it harder for poorer people.

[tjoff]

That's a very roundabout way to justify it though. How much would toll really affect food prices per person?

And is there really no other way to offset that?

[paganel]

> How much would toll really affect food prices per person?

Transportation costs (of which toll costs are a reasonable part, my brother is a lorry driver, I would know) are a big part of food costs, what's "roundabout" about it? That's how the economy works, that's how putting food on people's tables works.

> And is there really no other way to offset that?

No, one cannot offset it that by whooshing it way or by creating a clever phone app for it. This is real life, not Silicon Valley-make believe. People's lives depend on this, on the price of food, that is.

[astrange]

Wouldn't say food is especially expensive in Japan or that they don't have enough roads.

[paganel]

Yes, exactly, because the "small" cars are paying the roads for the trucks transporting the food (through relatively higher tolls, through direct or indirect taxation applied on "small" cars' owners etc).

Take the small cars completely out of the equation (like banning them) and you're putting all the costs of building those roads on whom?

[rhn_mk1]

"Reverse engineering" is where you learn something about how a system works, especially nonpublic information.

What you described doesn't have anything nonpublic or learned facts. Instead, it's a cooperation to fool someone into not having to pay for service. I'm not sure if it could even be called "cracking", since that typically involves learning new facts, too. Only "exploiting" comes to mind.

[fuzzfactor]

I'll concede the exploiting but there's always going to be some discrepancy about what a natural-born Florida "Cracker" is to begin with :)

And engineering is over exaggerated too, more like the tickets were merely reversed not thoroughly reverse engineered.

We certainly weren't going to counterfeit any tickets.

Just work around the system.

[rhn_mk1]

"Reversing" without "engineering" only makes sense if you mean that they were turned around on their route :P Otherwise "reversing" doesn't have a standalone meaning that I know that fits here.

[andrepd]

>tolls are expensive

Well do you know what's expensive? Highways. In the US less than 20c of every dollar come from road tax/fuel tax/tolls. The rest is paid by taxpayers, whether or not they use those roads, whether or not they drive, whether they drive a 3.5 ton SUV or a 1 ton "small" car. This is not even getting into the terrible externalities that car use entails.

Personal automobiles pay far too little.

>tolls should cease after initial amount is paid

A good ballpark is every ~30 years you spend, in maintenance, the same amount of money it took to build it in the first place.

[HyperSane]

Toll roads are stupid.

[gadders]

>>but the toll was and still is ridiculous too, considering it was agreed there would be no toll after the construction was paid for, And it was well paid for decades ago.

Same with the QE2 bridge in the UK. Governments are disgusting.

https://www.essexlive.news/news/essex-news/dartford-crossing...

[Eisenstein]

> And it was well paid for decades ago.

What happens when you build a road and declare it done and then never deal with it again? Does it continue to work as a road after a few years?

> Governments are disgusting.

Who builds roads?