Comment box Scope: personal reaction, information, opinion Tone: neutral Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: none This is a huge benefit for society. People are blissfully unaware of the immense financial...
Exemplary
Comment box
Scope: personal reaction, information, opinion
Tone: neutral
Opinion: yes
Sarcasm/humor: none
This is a huge benefit for society. People are blissfully unaware of the immense financial and social cost of maintaining hundreds of thousands of miles of highway infrastructure. Having a small toll reduces the incentive to drive very slightly, just enough to make someone consider taking alternatives.
Tolls induce a slight mode shift toward other forms of travel, like walking, buses, trains, cycling, ebike, etc., or simply not taking unnecessary trips via car at all. Personal automobiles are a pretty inefficient method of transport, especially on long-distance highways, so a slight prod in the right direction is a good thing.
The poorest people in society do not drive personal vehicles and are the worst-affected by externalities of highways (pollution, traffic violence). Therefore, modest tolls on highways are more equitable than the current subsidy.
Highway tolls are:
Better for the environment - fewer cars means less emissions in the air and less tire microplastics leaching into the ground // water. Plants will do better with fewer cars. And all that. And maybe this will cause some people to realize they don't need a car at all, so long-term there could be fewer production emissions. And less Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) means traffic engineers can build smaller roads, which means fewer paved surfaces, which means better rainwater management, which is good for environmental sustainability.
Safer for all people - cars are the physical cause of death of tens of thousands of people in the USA annually, including many Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) as well as drivers. No other mode is as deadly. The #1 solution in the hierarchy of controls is to physically remove the threat. Less VMT, less traffic deaths.
Healthier for individuals - cars obviously emit toxic fumes which cause asthma and exacerbate other cardiovascular diseases. Fewer cars means fewer fumes. The microplastics remain an issue with EVs so it is helpful even then. Also less driving means less road rage, a consistent problem which is both physically and psychologically harmful. Also, maybe something like this would encourage people to take a bus and walk the remaining distance --- reducing the sedentary-ness of our lifestyles is definitely a health bonus. And long-term maybe it will just culturally reduce people's psychological dependence on the car, so they'll walk more even if they don't strictly need to.
Better for traffic - tolls reduce the total number of vehicles on the road slightly, which reduces congestion. And if implemented on a peak/off-peak basis, they also spread out non-time-sensitive traffic throughout the day. This improves road capacity and functionally allows us to repurpose roads overbuilt for peak hours for better uses, like bicycle lanes, street cafes, trees and rainwater/permeable areas, art sculptures or whatever
Fiscally responsible - there is no concept of farebox recovery for highways in our society, which means we are massively subsidizing highway use despite its worse efficiency vs. other modes and its various externalities. And economically speaking it is generally a good idea for people to 'pay for what you use' because markets contain more information than free services, so now the transportation system is at least comparing driving with other modes on a marginally more level field (in Indiana) ---- in an ideal world tolls would be completely demand-based, similar to most planes/trains, either based on time of day (as stated above) or more granularly, maybe time of year too.....
Directly beneficial for transit systems - the biggest beneficiaries here are probably Amtrak,Greyhound etc which do long-distance public transportation. The tolls incentivize more Amtrak ridership. This improves Amtrak's profit margin and allows them to offer more and better train service. Better Amtrak ridership and profitability figures also encourages politicians to provide more capital funding for high-speed rail infrastructure, which is one of best ways (often the very best) to travel medium to long distances.
Indiana has very slow trains (none above 60 mph with one exception which is really just an extension of Chicago). It is also a centrally located place which historically had very many trains. High Speed Rail (at least higher than right now) would be very useful for many Amtrak trips originating in or traveling through Chicago, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Cinncinnati, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Milwaukee, and even Washington DC and Minneapolis. If Indiana now has a slightly higher incentive to pay for infrastructure to enable even 79 mph trains, that would make a big difference throughout the Amtrak system, beyond just Indiana. 110-125 mph would be great.
Encouraging for Transit-Oriented Development (TOD). Even a slight incentive not to drive makes housing options near train/bus stations more attractive to people. This drives demand for more such housing in walkable or transit-connected places, rather than disconnected exurbs off the highway. Municipal zoning boards do have to do some work to make this happen though.
Better for personal finances - if you take a bigger view than the cost of the toll, the societal benefits of all the above definitely result in lower end-costs for regular people. Environmental destruction always has a financial cost (more roads = more flooding = more home damage), so does traffic safety and health (hospital visits are expensive), and land use (living near transit enables cheaper lifestyles). Obviously no one likes paying tolls, but that's the point.
Public transit almost always has a small fee. Regional trains almost always charge tickets based on distance traveled. Highway tolls ought to be at least the same, ideally higher. Just like public transit, it would be simple for governments to create a system to accommodate edge cases for people who actually '"need"' toll-free highway travel, but unlike public transit, the number of people this reasonably applies to is probably quite small.
governor of Indiana
Not necessarily where I would have expected this, but I think this lends credibility to my argument about necessity. This is an actual technical issue, not just an ideological one. Highways and personal vehicle use have so excessively dominated our lives, and municipal spending, that the problem has gotten out of control. Even very partisan-aligned entities are recognizing that something must be done.
Yea god forbid we just have odometer readings done as part of inspections and tax according to total mileage. This, of course, will never happen because than EZPass won't get a cut.
Yea god forbid we just have odometer readings done as part of inspections and tax according to total mileage.
This, of course, will never happen because than EZPass won't get a cut.
Or even parts of states, and the types of inspections vary. Some parts of Illinois have emissions inspections. Mine doesn't. This is very confusing for parents of students who live on campus whose...
Or even parts of states, and the types of inspections vary. Some parts of Illinois have emissions inspections. Mine doesn't. This is very confusing for parents of students who live on campus whose cars are here and won't get inspected here. (There's a process for this just nothing the university does anything with.)
But other states have more thorough inspections, like brakes, steering, etc. I always assumed that lacking any mountains no one cared here, but I'm sure there's some history
When I moved to Michigan, I asked about vehicle inspections since the state i moved from required them every few years. I was told no inspections are required to renew vehicle registration. I told...
When I moved to Michigan, I asked about vehicle inspections since the state i moved from required them every few years. I was told no inspections are required to renew vehicle registration. I told the person I was surprised since Michigan was the home of the American car industry, and I had expected them to have fairly robust vehicle regulations.
No, the opposite in fact. They're are no toll roads in Michigan. There are tolls on the international bridge crossings, but no roads. There are also no vehicle inspections required for most cars....
No, the opposite in fact. They're are no toll roads in Michigan. There are tolls on the international bridge crossings, but no roads. There are also no vehicle inspections required for most cars. Presumably this is due to intensive long term lobbying on the part of the Big 3 auto makers.
Tbh it is pretty spotty, I'm not sure Michigan stands out that much? Vehicle inspection in the United States - Wikipedia Illinois only has them for emissions for example, and only near Chicago and...
Tbh it is pretty spotty, I'm not sure Michigan stands out that much?
Illinois only has them for emissions for example, and only near Chicago and St. louis and that's pretty common. Only 14 states have mandatory safety inspections.
Not saying this isn't due to lobbying, I don't know the political push/pull on that, a car that fails inspection is a car that may be replaced after all. But I am surprised it's not more common in the Rockies, as I assumed it had something to do with mountains and such.
Apparently more states used to have inspections, but the decline of full service stations (versus mere gas stations) meant that states were faced with building and running their own inspection...
Apparently more states used to have inspections, but the decline of full service stations (versus mere gas stations) meant that states were faced with building and running their own inspection centers. On top of that, there’s always political pressure to make driving cheaper.
Got a link to some history on it? I'm intrigued now. I found a claim that MN got rid of them because cars didn't fail them, for example (rust kills them first). Or that Kansas did because they...
Got a link to some history on it? I'm intrigued now.
I found a claim that MN got rid of them because cars didn't fail them, for example (rust kills them first). Or that Kansas did because they felt the inspections were mostly residents spending money to mechanics who signed off without inspecting anything and felt modern cars were safer.
I'm just curious since folks have made the claims that this is automaker lobbying, political pressure and costs to the state whether there's any evidence towards that?
In Jersey any certified repair shop can also do inspections. Doesn't need to be the state DMV. Also.....massive infrastructure is needed to install toll survielance where there currently isn't any.
In Jersey any certified repair shop can also do inspections. Doesn't need to be the state DMV.
Also.....massive infrastructure is needed to install toll survielance where there currently isn't any.
The point is that NJ requires inspections in the state, not all states do or have that system set up. And mine only has inspections in some of the state and only for emissions in metro STL/CHI...
The point is that NJ requires inspections in the state, not all states do or have that system set up. And mine only has inspections in some of the state and only for emissions in metro STL/CHI areas for example
Come to think of it, pretty much every car made after 2016 could self-report more or less continously. Not a fan of more spyware, but that's what 'tolls everywhere' adds up to anyhow.
Come to think of it, pretty much every car made after 2016 could self-report more or less continously.
Not a fan of more spyware, but that's what 'tolls everywhere' adds up to anyhow.
I am personally baffled by the people willing to jump on the libertarian "privatize all roads" train and the "let the cars report more back to the government" train at the same time. Just because...
I am personally baffled by the people willing to jump on the libertarian "privatize all roads" train and the "let the cars report more back to the government" train at the same time. Just because it's a train? Both sound horrible to me, even though I'd support a usage tax. (And I live without public transit and have to drive a wheelchair van which is already unaffordable when it's ten years old and isn't electric. )
But idk why you replied this to me, as I was just providing you with information about how inspections are not a universal feature in this country since you seemed to misunderstand the previous poster.
The general thought was 'more than one way to skin a cat' to do mileage based taxes without needing to deploy the inspection system specifically. I too would prefer less surveilance, but that's...
The general thought was 'more than one way to skin a cat' to do mileage based taxes without needing to deploy the inspection system specifically.
I too would prefer less surveilance, but that's likely not an option. A fixed annual fee of $600 annually to own a car would cover the gas tax and then some.
What’s wrong with… just having tolls? Lots of countries, including many touted for having good public infrastructure, have tolls, like Japan and many European countries. Like, logically, if the...
What’s wrong with… just having tolls? Lots of countries, including many touted for having good public infrastructure, have tolls, like Japan and many European countries.
Like, logically, if the goal is to charge cars for driving on a road, it makes more sense to add something to the road than to add something to every car in existence, since there’s a lot more cars than there are roads.
They were usually part of a privatisation kick, and private companies won't pay big bucks unless they receive a promise you won't build alternatives that could undermine their money fountain....
What’s wrong with… just having tolls?
They were usually part of a privatisation kick, and private companies won't pay big bucks unless they receive a promise you won't build alternatives that could undermine their money fountain. Also, said privatisation is often just an excuse to sell a money fountain to the politicians' mates for dirt-cheap (although that won't stop them from demanding the monopoly anyway).
My only qualm with it is that in my area there's no alternative to driving. The city nearest to me has done pretty well, there's only a toll lane on highways for which there is a pretty good...
My only qualm with it is that in my area there's no alternative to driving.
The city nearest to me has done pretty well, there's only a toll lane on highways for which there is a pretty good public transport alternative right next to the highway. Doesn't work great for people just passing through the city, but works amazing for people who previously would have had to use the highway to get into the city.
Comment box Scope: comment response, information, opinion Tone: neutral Opinion: not really Sarcasm/humor: none In theory, one of the ways to incentivize alternatives to driving at a systemic,...
Comment box
Scope: comment response, information, opinion
Tone: neutral
Opinion: not really
Sarcasm/humor: none
In theory, one of the ways to incentivize alternatives to driving at a systemic, societal level is to increase the cost of living in car-dependent places, relative to places with transit/walkability. A carbon tax or a road toll (which is partially a specialized carbon tax), is one such method. Revenue can even be used to fund multimodal capital projects or services, which is a positive incentive (pull factor) to take alternatives.
Negative incentives (push factors) are unpopular because they're perceived as punitive or regressive (truly or falsely). However, they are effective. A road toll is unlikely to cause anyone to move (moving has higher costs), but it is a disincentive for more people to move to a place without multimodal transportation options. This is more important. Paired with other small negative incentives, the total cost becomes high enough to register as a decision when choosing housing, such as living in a townhome nearer work instead of in a home in a disconnected neighborhood which requires daily highway use.
Planners avoid explicitly talking about negative incentives because doing so is political suicide. Individualist libertarians object to the principle of taxation and collectivist social progressives object to the image of dislocating or inconveniencing people (whether that image is real or imagined). But at least some small negative incentives are functionally necessary to overcome cultural inertia: meta-analyses demonstrate that both push and pull factors are necessary to reduce car dependency.
It's much more politically palatable to talk about Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) than any disincentive to drive a car. This means rezoning land surrounding public transit stops (train or bus). This encourages transit ridership and reduces car-dependency by focusing population density along corridors with transportation alternatives. TOD is a great solution and something I advocate for regularly. It's useful for all trips, but especially medium and long-distance ones. There is also such thing as Trail-Oriented Development (TrOD), which is important for walkability/riding bikes for shorter distances.
If you build enough transit-adjacent housing with enough variety to suit cultural expectations, negative incentives are less important to inducing a mode shift away from driving. In practice, it is politically challenging to enact TOD even in progressive places because NIMBY attitudes go beyond any particular political ideology. People irrationally object to change. Progressives find imaginary environmental or gentrification reasons to kill housing projects, conservatives harp on aesthetics or perceived demographic disruption, everyone worries (unscientifically) about traffic. Zoning is also bureaucratic and complex, so citizens rarely participate even if it's important. So, in practice, and per research, it's important to try multiple things.
toll lane on highways for which there is a pretty good public transport alternative right next to the highway
In this case your neighboring city has implemented the "pull factor" (transit) and is now implementing the "push factor" (highway tolls) as they expand transit services. This is extremely slow -- like, a "beyond your children's lifetimes to fully implement" type of slow. However, it is politically feasible. Ultimately, implementing good projects is more important than designing them to be perfect and then failing to build them.
An ideal mode shift plan would strategically implement positive and negative incentives in an alternating fashion such that it's not an "all or nothing" decision. Ideally people will not notice the negatives so much, or will appreciate the positives at the same time. As an area becomes more multimodal, it becomes more politically feasible to accelerate implementation with bolder visions and more aggressive timelines.
There's a point when the collective incentive to design walkable, transit-connected places gains enough momentum to maintain a relatively dominant political force. This status is a spectrum. In the United States, this is best exemplified in New York City in every borough except Staten Island. It's also becoming true in Los Angeles. This is not strictly a "city thing" -- it's possible to have great connectivity in smaller towns -- but is easier to accomplish in dense areas. Statewide legislation, such as a recent zoning law in California and state funding for capital projects in New York, come with this.
I really appreciate your post, you obviously put a lot of time and effort on researching these policies You lost me at systemic, societal level. I live in the rural south. People here are poor....
I really appreciate your post, you obviously put a lot of time and effort on researching these policies
You lost me at systemic, societal level. I live in the rural south. People here are poor. Like, poor poor. The politicians know this. I could walk to the corner store, but its a two lane highway and theres no shoulder, much less sidewalk. Some people drive their lawn mower to the grocery store because they have mobility issues.
Hell will freeze over before anyone around here elects anyone that even utters the word “taxes” unless its talking about taxes going down.
So, I really just want a sidewalk to the corner store. Thats what I put on the meeting notes every month. For years. Its slow, like you said, but things move slow around here. I’ll be over the moon if we don’t become Atlanta 2.0
Honestly, the real solution to rural poverty, long term, is to make cities more affordable. Being poor in a rural area is really, really hard. The difference is that unlike being poor in a city,...
Honestly, the real solution to rural poverty, long term, is to make cities more affordable.
Being poor in a rural area is really, really hard. The difference is that unlike being poor in a city, which is also really hard, being poor in a rural area is hard because of of the nature of the world, rather than because of deliberate political choices.
It's pretty cheap to provide services to people when there are lots of them in a small geographical region. It's really expensive when they're spread out.
Like, most people need a fire truck at their house maybe once, or even less in their entire lives on average. To provide someone with fire services though, you need to put a fire truck close to them, whether they use it or not. That means you need lots of rural fire departments with a truck that just sits there doing nothing 99% of the time.
It's a massively expensive endeavor that rural counties don't have the tax base to pay for, so they're always bankrupt, require federal dollars to subsidize them, and slash services.
If cities didn't have reputations of being dirty, crime ridden, expensive, and difficult to find housing in (all the result of political choices), it would be a lot more attractive to live in the type of place where public services could be provided without requiring massive taxation, and rural areas could be primarily inhabited by people who absolutely need to live there because they work in agriculture, instead of the current situation where it's the only affordable place to live for many people.
It's great when you're healthy enough to work and maintain your own property. Not so much when you aren't. People live out here for the space, but also the way of life. We're just expected to take...
It's great when you're healthy enough to work and maintain your own property. Not so much when you aren't. People live out here for the space, but also the way of life. We're just expected to take care of ourselves. A fire on a rural property does mean that you lose everything, the fire dept just can't get there in time to actually save anything. The trick is to just not set your house on fire.
I'm not totally sure what I'm going to do when I become too old to take care of my property, I know I'll sell it, but I can't see myself hating the city any less than I do right now. No salt to those who love the city, it's just loud and there's people everywhere.
Comment box Scope: comment response, information, advice Tone: neutral Opinion: I suppose Sarcasm/humor: none I hope you are able to get your sidewalk built. Your Rural [Transportation] Planning...
Comment box
Scope: comment response, information, advice
Tone: neutral
Opinion: I suppose
Sarcasm/humor: none
I hope you are able to get your sidewalk built.
Your Rural [Transportation] Planning Organization (R[T]PO) (or similar; might be called a Regional Council or something) or Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) probably maintains a detailed sidewalk inventory and probably has someone whose job it is to coordinate pedestrian infrastructure. (In my region is this DVRPC……) If you haven’t already communicated with yours, they would be a useful contact. These are the federal or state organizations that develop plans and write/acquire grants for capital infrastructure. State Departments of Transportation and local councils often rely on their recommendations to prioritize infrastructure funding allocations. There are differences state-to-state though. Ideally , the sidewalk you want built would get put into a “regional sidewalk plan” of some sort, as a result of pressure from constituents.
There is strength in numbers. A neighborly coalition is more effective than individual requests. Politicians acknowledge voting blocs and can pressure planners to prioritize projects that engaged constituents want.
That's good info, thanks! I don't really think my community knows how to secure funding, there's a lot of grants out there that we're not even trying for.
That's good info, thanks! I don't really think my community knows how to secure funding, there's a lot of grants out there that we're not even trying for.
If it’s that poor/rural, I don’t think there is a need nor the likelihood of tolls being built anyhow. There’s needs to be a lot of traffic to make it worthwhile. Or, if there’s a highway that...
If it’s that poor/rural, I don’t think there is a need nor the likelihood of tolls being built anyhow. There’s needs to be a lot of traffic to make it worthwhile. Or, if there’s a highway that passes through, just the highway would be tolled.
Comment box Scope: comment response, question Tone: curious Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: none Interesting idea, I had not considered that. But isn't it pretty easy to hack into odometers and change...
Comment box
Scope: comment response, question
Tone: curious
Opinion: yes
Sarcasm/humor: none
Interesting idea, I had not considered that. But isn't it pretty easy to hack into odometers and change them? Would alot of people do that to evade taxes? I'm not sure how hard it would be to enforce that, compared to, enforcing that people have real/non-covered-up license plates (how people avoid tolls).
There may be serious consequences, but unless there’s serious enforcement it doesn’t change very much. If don’t do something crazy it’s pretty hard to detect. The laws are entirely designed around...
There may be serious consequences, but unless there’s serious enforcement it doesn’t change very much. If don’t do something crazy it’s pretty hard to detect.
The laws are entirely designed around people falsifying the odometer for sale. In this case, it’s just your personal vehicle. For sale, you can try to piece together previous records to find inconsistencies. For just a persons car, unless you hire a PI to track them for a month not much you can do.
(i) Drivers may opt into a $0.02/mile pay-as-you-go system with an $86 annual registration fee.
(l) Calculated as a function of vehicle miles driven; set at $131.88 for EVs.
(o) Users may elect to pay $0.0111 per mile driven instead.
In June Mike Braun, the governor of Indiana, signed a law giving the state the authority to raise tolls on all of its existing interstate highways. No state has previously tried that, says Robert Poole, a transportation expert at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think-tank.
For now, drivers pay to access just 6,300 miles of America’s 160,000 or so miles of highway. But, says Mr Poole, the share may be about to grow rapidly. Assuming the federal government goes along with it, Indiana’s experiment could lead to toll roads proliferating across the United States.
The reason why federal law banned states from collecting tolls on interstates was that drivers had already paid for the roads by means of a tax on petrol (or gasoline). In 1956, when the Federal-Aid Highway Act passed, for every gallon drivers bought, three cents (or $0.36 today) went into a “federal highway trust fund”. The fund raised enough money to build out the federal highway system, enabling the transformation of America into a hypermobile, motorised society.
The problem is that the model no longer works. Over the decades, the cost of maintaining roads and highways has risen, even as cars have become more fuel-efficient. And raising gas taxes, even just in line with inflation, is generally considered to be political suicide. The last time Congress did it was in 1993. The result is a giant deficit. In fiscal 2024, the federal government spent $27bn more on maintaining roads than it collected in tax. At the state and local levels, fuel taxes covered barely a quarter of road spending.
...
By deterring some drivers, tolls also limit congestion. Some of the most successful projects have been “express” lanes added to highways where drivers pay variable rates to skip traffic. California State Route 91, a famously clogged highway in Los Angeles, has a toll lane with high peak prices and where the cost to enter it can adjust as often as every three minutes, according to traffic levels. These sorts of projects are expanding.
I really liked how the express lanes were done in the areas of the SF Bay Area I lived - express lanes really only charged during periods of high congestion, and were free with 2+ people in the...
I really liked how the express lanes were done in the areas of the SF Bay Area I lived - express lanes really only charged during periods of high congestion, and were free with 2+ people in the car.
I generally dislike the idea of entirely restricting roads based on tolls - IMO, roads should be public-access, and that means they should be free. And I don’t love the idea of third-party companies (like EzPass) taking a cut of the toll.
Ideally, we’d charge something at the DMV based on vehicle weight & miles driven, since the gas tax ignores EVs and apparently is political suicide to raise. But I guess since we don’t have the infrastructure in place for that, toll roads do make sense.
Because I'm not seeing this addressed nearly enough: Great! The road should be public access, available to all. Now take a stroll through the road (not the sidewalk), and tell me it's currently...
Because I'm not seeing this addressed nearly enough:
roads should be public-access, and that means they should be free
Great! The road should be public access, available to all. Now take a stroll through the road (not the sidewalk), and tell me it's currently accessible to all, instead of paved, maintained, widened, paid for, and throwing off excess noise and other pollutants for the exclusive benefit of motorists instead of inhabitants of the area.
The road currently has a toll: it's the price of an automobile, with the costs associated with one. This makes the costs more overt, but also more targeted at those that are benefiting.
As it stands, we're all subsidizing motorists, and enforcement for traffic violations is nowhere close to stringent enough for me to have any sympathy at all for them
Probably for the best. Having some kind of usage based metering is useful for making sure money is allocated where it’s being used. More popular roads = more tolls = more maintenance required....
Probably for the best. Having some kind of usage based metering is useful for making sure money is allocated where it’s being used. More popular roads = more tolls = more maintenance required.
When I drove in japan the tolls were quite high and frequent and that definitely changed the calculus on train vs car even in the more rural areas. A train ticket can be 4,200 yen and the same distance on toll road would be 3,400 yen. So after gas, often more expensive if you don’t have another person with you.
A personal anecdote of my recent toll road experience that I expect will be more and more common. I recently went through a toll road in Kansas and it has resulted in me complaining to the Kansas...
A personal anecdote of my recent toll road experience that I expect will be more and more common. I recently went through a toll road in Kansas and it has resulted in me complaining to the Kansas Governor's office and Kansas Turnpike Authority which will most likely result in them telling me to go fuck myself. I'm not a resident of Kansas which will further bolster them to tell me to go fuck myself.
They have automated tolling like most places now, not on-road tolling, and they have one fee for people who have K-Tags and an increased fee if they do license plate recognition. Well not going through this toll road would tack an hour onto my route so I decided it was worth it based on the posted prices. As I'm driving up to the toll road there are signs posted telling me where to go to sign up to pay for the toll online, but of course I'm driving so I can't sign up while I'm driving.
I ended up signing up within 48 hours, which I figured was adequate. I was probably driving for at least another 5 hours after going through that toll road, was tired and fell asleep right away after stopping on the drive, and then immediately resuming the drive the next morning and driving all day.
In any case, I eventually go on the site, sign up, put in my car information and license plate following all instructions the site told me to do, and then I waited. The last toll road I went on somewhere else that I can't recall now, it took them like a month to assign the toll fee to my account but they eventually did it. So I was not entirely surprised after a few weeks that for this Kansas Turnpike toll that they hadn't assigned the toll fee yet.
Then about 1.5 months later, I receive two mailed bills, duplicate letters in separate envelopes, both dated for 1st of December (I went through the toll road on October 18th). I checked my account online and saw there was no fees. I look at the mailed bills and the account number shown on there differs from the account number assigned to me online. The mailed bills also conveniently show that they charge $1.50 for mailing fees, and of course since they mailed it twice at once it has 2 of those fees. They also listed the toll charge as $0, but the past due amount was $5.52 which then made it hard for me to determine if that was the full toll amount or if they also were tacking on late fees in there.
What bothers me about this is, I followed all the posted instructions, and they somehow concocted a system where it doesn't assign the toll fees to the account I created on their site, then tacks on additional fees, obscures the real toll cost, and when I submit a dispute on their site, they ignore it. Then I call them and the support rep says the best they can do is move the fees over from the one account that was associated with the mailed bills over to the account I made on their site, but they couldn't remove the extra fees, and conveniently they have to close the dispute I opened online before in order to accomplish this task. The support rep tells me that shortly after I drive through and it reads my license plate, it already begins the process of creating an account and starting the billing process for that. So if that is to be believed, before I had created the account online but after I drove through the toll road, it had already created an account for me and began this other process. So I guess their system conveniently does not notify you of this when you put in your vehicle information online, well before they've generated a single mailed statement.
So I open another dispute online, and they tell me similar BS and that they won't or can't remove the fees. Granted I don't really care about the $3 (or more, since it's really not clear what all the charges actually are) that much, but its the principle for me. That $3 to one individual is not much, but to them, for all the people driving through that toll road, is likely significant, and I assume they crafted this bullshit intentionally to extract additional fees from people as it is likely a significant revenue boost.
I tried contacting some office of the governor that oversees the Kansas Turnpike Authority, and of course they send me some bullshit about how they are referring my complaint over to the KTA, though they haven't responded yet.
These automated toll roads are seemingly ripe for abuse, because they can make up whatever they want after you've driven through and there's no recourse.
I kind of doubt it actually. It's more likely it's the result of buerocratic disorganization. These projects are often rushed and underfunded. There were probably a series of errors that had no QA...
I assume they crafted this bullshit intentionally to extract additional fees from people as it is likely a significant revenue boost.
I kind of doubt it actually. It's more likely it's the result of buerocratic disorganization. These projects are often rushed and underfunded. There were probably a series of errors that had no QA process in place to catch them, and they have no remediation process in place to fix it. There's definitely someone within their billing process with enough power and knowledge to understand your problem and fix it, but good luck getting through the call center to actually get to that person. This kind of thing is ridiculously common in government, but it's usually not on purpose. It's just incompetence.
They’re implying that it’s ironic that Republicans would be against tolls since giving things away for free, resulting in long lines, is what communist states were known for.
They’re implying that it’s ironic that Republicans would be against tolls since giving things away for free, resulting in long lines, is what communist states were known for.
Toll roads are often built with private partnership, where the state provides the real estate and favorable bond tax treatment, and a private set of investors are responsible for building and...
Toll roads are often built with private partnership, where the state provides the real estate and favorable bond tax treatment, and a private set of investors are responsible for building and operating the toll road and take on the risk (and profit) from tolling revenue.
If the government was to remove tolls on these roads ("give them away"), they would need buy out the private companies currently operating them. Because demand for free things is so high, you would see traffic jams ("queues") on those toll roads.
I mean, in PA at least I've never met anybody deterred from using the PA Turnpike (RT 76) because the alternative is 10x more driving. Removing all the tolls would just make for smoother driving.
I mean, in PA at least I've never met anybody deterred from using the PA Turnpike (RT 76) because the alternative is 10x more driving. Removing all the tolls would just make for smoother driving.
Hi, it's me, one of those drivers. When going home to Ohio from the DC area for the holidays, I will often opt to add more than an hour to the trip by taking the southern route through Cumberland...
Hi, it's me, one of those drivers. When going home to Ohio from the DC area for the holidays, I will often opt to add more than an hour to the trip by taking the southern route through Cumberland instead of paying the usurious PA turnpike tolls.
I would take the train in a heartbeat if it was viable, but every time I look into it the itinerary is twice as long as driving and usually more expensive than a flight. A Greyhound would take many extra hours compared to driving either route. So in my case the toll is purely detrimental to the environment: all it does is incentivize me to use more gas.
I've also taken that route for the same reasons. Plus, have even one more person traveling with you and anything but driving doesn't make much sense at all. The train is at least somewhat...
I've also taken that route for the same reasons. Plus, have even one more person traveling with you and anything but driving doesn't make much sense at all.
The train is at least somewhat comfortable IME but when I do have to fly I hate it so much. I haven't tried Greyhound but I genuinely get pretty car sick when not being the driver of the vehicle. This combined with my personal life reasons is one of the reasons I don't travel a lot anymore. Hopefully I can get an electric car with my next purchase. And that'll work maybe.. But the wheelchair van will still be a gas guzzling giant albatross around my neck
Comment box Scope: comment response, information, question Tone: neutral Opinion: a little Sarcasm/humor: none Greyhound is alright but I would rather take the train for trips above 2-3 hours. I...
Comment box
Scope: comment response, information, question
Tone: neutral
Opinion: a little
Sarcasm/humor: none
Greyhound is alright but I would rather take the train for trips above 2-3 hours.
I guess you already know this but you can reduce carsickness by sitting at the front of the bus. Greyhound lets you purchase a specific seat ticket for like $2 extra. I recommend sitting in a location where you can see out of the front of the bus (aisle seat), but the windows near the front are ok. This reduces your brain's overemphasis on lateral motion. Source: I used to get carsick. I don't anymore but that was a big help when I did.
Are there not electric vans that would suit your accessibility needs? Or are they just too expensive?
I get carsick in the driver's seat, mostly because I can't just sit and not do anything for hours so anything that pulls my head down like reading, phone, etc. leads me to nausea. And personally...
I get carsick in the driver's seat, mostly because I can't just sit and not do anything for hours so anything that pulls my head down like reading, phone, etc. leads me to nausea. And personally without driving I can't pay attention to the road to avoid it. And that's best case. Trains and planes I'm usually ok on. But they move differently and you can walk around on a train.
In 2023, a 2014 Grand Caravan with wheelchair conversion cost us 30k with only 30k miles on it. 9-19 year old wheelchair vans still run 25-30k. Even with 200k miles. And the cost varies depending on the modifications. He can't drive or transfer so he has specific needs.
I haven't seen an electric wheelchair van personally, but new gas powered ones (aka new vans modified) run 65-90k, so usually add 10-30k for the mods to that electric vehicle (are there even electric consumer vans?). I can't afford that. It's half of the cost of my house. Functionally I can't afford to replace the current vehicles I have, until I pay the van off at least.
a part where I go on a bit about the frustrations of accessibility and why I think people engage in ableism while on anti-car crusades
Partner can't drive, uses a power wheelchair and can't self transfer, but his assistant can drive when he has one. So I have a vehicle for work and a van for him. This maybe wouldn't be needed if we didn't live in a small town outside the city I work in but it was the only place I found a house mostly wheelchair accessible. And even then he has appointments with specialists in other cities.
A wheelchair accessible transport costs like $35 each way in town, and renting a wheelchair vehicle for a day is about $150 (and is also in another city).
Had I been able to find a place to live in the city, I'd still probably need the wheelchair van, public accessible transit is unreliable, and we've had so many evening/overnight trips to the ER that without a van he'd be stuck in the hospital without his chair, because ambulances also don't have ramps. That means coming home in an ambulance. That's not cheap either.
And when people talk about how pedestrians are getting screwed by the streets and such, sidewalks, even "nice" ones, suck for wheelchair users. Even the safety bumps on the ramps for visually impaired people make every intersection painful for my partner. The road is usually better but not always. And the snow and ice? Most people don't fully clear their sidewalks even if they try. A lack of personal vehicles without extensive pre-investment into infrastructure (and reinvestment as weather and salt degrades them) will make disabled people have to stay at home.
And NO ONE ever comes to their "presentation* of how much cars suck with a plan for this in hand. I never see even a mention of expanding door to door accessible transit service or addressing rural/semi-rural residents who cannot reasonably move. Or see people assume and address that disabled people want the same travel options - to travel independently or with people, even if public transit was the primary option.
If we were married we wouldn't be able to afford any of this because he would lose Medicaid. If he didn't have me, he wouldn't be able to afford any of this because he's on disability. He'd end up in a nursing home and he'd die.
Cars aren't independence just because of weird American values. I'd love to go back to being able to walk to work. I love walking to the grocery store (when I can, since I can't afford to only shop there). Build a more accessible world and I swear I'll do my best to use it. But build a world that only tries to make change by privatizing roads and lacking sympathy for motorists and far worse statements I've flagged from anti-car folks here and elsewhere? Fuck that.
Comment box Scope: comment response, personal reaction Tone: neutral, understanding Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: none Yeah I see how that is exorbitantly expensive. Rant taken, you are right to...
Comment box
Scope: comment response, personal reaction
Tone: neutral, understanding
Opinion: yes
Sarcasm/humor: none
Yeah I see how that is exorbitantly expensive.
Rant taken, you are right to express frustration at me.
Helping disabled people helps everyone so I agree it's important to implement. In the context of tolls, I would probably want to exempt disabled users, which should be relatively easy to technically implement. From a traffic volume perspective such an exemption is insignificant, but the benefit to disabled people is meaningful.
Response to going on a bit about anti-car crusades
And when people talk about how pedestrians are getting screwed by the streets and such, sidewalks, even "nice" ones, suck for wheelchair users.
Oh , well , this is a topic of regular conversation in my circles. The tree roots in the sidewalks are probably the most egregious issue, as well as cracked bricks and other blatant ADA violations. My city has at least installed curb cuts in most places.
In my opinion the big problem here is that sidewalks are legally considered the property of the landowner, even though they are a public Right of Way. Property owners have zero incentive to maintain sidewalks to an ADA standard unless they are old or disabled or happen to be very altruistic. Other than fining people for not maintaining their sidewalks -- and people HATE fines and HOA-esque fees even more than they hate road tolls -- I do not know what the solution is to this except for the government to seize control of all sidewalks. This is surely extremely unpopular among libertarians and also unpopular among government (who don't want to pay for all these sidewalks). In some cities this has already been accomplished, such as Boston and DC, but not in New York and San Francisco. There is a lot of state-by-state difference in the laws. Rectifying that one issue of sidewalk responsibility universally in all 50 states, by itself, would be an extremely worthy but lifelong/multi-generational campaign for a dedicated organization.
I've never considered negative impacts of tactile bumps. I am not sure how to resolve that from a strictly engineering/materials/design perspective. If the surface has to be bumpy enough for blind people to feel it through thick soles, I don't know how it could also be designed to be gentle for wheelchairs.
I advocate for "raised crosswalks" where the crosswalk is at sidewalk level and basically part OF the sidewalk. Cars are forced to slow because of the built-in speed cushion. Perhaps this eliminates the need for tactile bumps - or they could have them at the edges of the raised crosswalk to either side to stop people from veering into the street, but not directly ahead as you cross the street. Or perhaps not because cars are still what kill Vulnerable Road Users at intersections, even if they're going slower, maybe they're still necessary.
In my city, bike advocates have started calling bike lanes "mobility lanes" in disability context, and trying to explicitly include disability access as a reason to install more bike lanes. We see a lot of wheelchair users choosing to use asphalt bike lanes for the reasons you describe. Riding a bike over bumpy surfaces is also unpleasant, so it's a natural alliance. So far there aren't any complaints from bikers. As long as they have a way to pass wheelchair users, it's ok. So maybe the best solution is more and wider protected bike lanes with mid-block curb cuts (without tactile markers?). Or maybe just 1 tactile marker is ok if you can avoid the rest of them while traveling along streets in a bike/mobility lane?
I'm guessing you live outside a city because it's cheaper? We should be building enough urban housing for everyone to afford an apartment with an elevator or accessible townhome if they need it. My city is OK about this but there is just so much NIMBY obstruction to increasing the housing supply. Zoning is like a war.
Unfortunately I have seen that some opponents to housing, and opponents to safety improvements for wheelchair users/bike users, use "accessibility impacts" as a reason to block obviously beneficial infrastructure, such as physical separation of mobility lanes from car traffic. In a recent case in my city these opponents also fought against loading zones to improve accessibility for drivers (including disabled passengers) because it was part of a 'bike lane' project. It is dishonest and cruel in my opinion.
And the snow and ice? Most people don't fully clear their sidewalks even if they try.
In principle I do not believe individuals should be responsible for this. I think the government should just do it. They plow roads, they can clear sidewalks.
In practice this is an unresolved question. Personally I think there are a few necessary steps:
{1} implementing '15-minute cities' so that the absolute longest distance a disabled person must travel by rolling is quite small.
{2} government clears all sidewalks, just like it already does for car lanes. (Also, bike/mobility lanes can be cleared with specialized vehicles pretty easily). As you say, investment by government is necessary.
{3} if {2} is impossible, enacting higher fines on able-bodied people who do not clear their sidewalks. This is obviously not ideal because maybe someone has to work a long shift and isn't physically at home. Or whatever.
{4} so since {3} is at best incomplete, government pays for heated sidewalks for disabled people or something like that. Seems hard to implement and maintain. I am not sure.
{5} salting is the immediate solution to ice remaining despite good intentions of neighbors clearing snow. It is effective, it works. Environmental impact is real and I do not know what the solution to that is. Heated sidewalks everywhere is probably not feasible.
In Minnesota they have skywalks between many downtown buildings to allow for access in snow conditions. In Buffalo they have many tunnels. I am doubtful that tunnels and skywalks are a realistic solution outside of urban centers and university campuses.
If a disabled person lived in a home with some sort of covering for the walkway to access the curb, a transit or paratransit vehicle could support them. For example an urban apartment. Or if they live on a street with a bike lane, they can use the bike lane, because the municipal vehicles would have cleared it just as well as the roads. In theory. Still need mid-block curb cuts and stuff like that to work.
I don't think any urbanists object to paratransit, especially for this purpose, even if they object to "cars." In practice the issue is volume of cars, not existence per se, even if people wax about cars as a class of vehicles. There is often talk of retractable bollards and so forth to allow for emergency vehicle access on appropriate corridors, and I think in any situation where "cars are banned" in some hypothetical, almost anyone seriously interested in urbanism would consider paratransit part of that exception matrix.
expanding door to door accessible transit service
Anything in particular that a good accessible transit service has/offers in your opinion? Or avoids doing? I am wondering if there are ways my city could do this better. We have a paratransit service which goes anywhere the buses/trains go. So not door-to-door technically, unless you live by a bus stop, but the network is relatively extensive at least.
The big problem in my city is that we can't even fund our regular transit system. I think if we asked anyone in my advocacy group they would be willing to put out CTAs for paratransit expansion specifically, but it would be basically the same as the existing CTA for transit funding. In this case the legislators who are blocking transit care even less about paratransit so the political approach is not clear to me. In my experience urbanists who are actually involved in political lobbying are receptive to disability needs more so than random people on the internet, but we can still do better. I recently connected with a particularly vocal disability advocate on "Linked - In" social media and seeing his posts every day is very helpful to me.
addressing rural/semi-rural residents who cannot reasonably move
I don't think there is any consensus among urbanists about how to "help" disabled people in rural areas beyond solutions that also apply to cities. We all know that unfortunately that disability happens "in place" as well as by birth, which means anyone can become disabled at any time and be stuck where they are. So I don't think "addressing" this problem can be accomplished by anything less than a whole-scale societal revamp of land use and taxation to ensure that fewer people live in places that are (structurally) functionally impossible to serve with accessible resources.
The only other, or additional, solution I see is a deep rejection of societal individuality and instead adopting a grassroots community support mechanism whereby local communities go out of their way to help disabled neighbors thrive. I participate in this personally but I cannot change a culture and neither can the urbanist bloc. What I can advocate for is a built environment where people live close enough together to incentivize communal support systems and make them more practical. In my opinion this does not require everyone to live in a city, but does require almost everyone to live in or quite near a town. Culturally many people object to that and will never accept it, so I am at a loss.
The only approach anyone agrees on is to build enough accessible housing in cities and towns to house everyone if they want to live there. But some/many people simply dislike being near other people, categorically. They do not like cities, and they do not like towns, and they do not like being 'supported' by government systems, and so I do not know what to do about those people as they age and become disabled 'in-place'. Regarding transportation I am inclined to ignore them, because if a person is socially conditioned to dislike society, no solution I can possibly present will be acceptable to them.
Universal healthcare would help a lot. Among urbanists, probably every single one supports it wholeheartedly. That particular problem is beyond my lobbying knowledge or abilities. It is personally my #1 or #2 criterion when I vote but I am not capable of helping the movement otherwise.
Comment box Scope: comment response, information Tone: neutral,encyclopedic Opinion: not really Sarcasm/humor: none The PA turnpike toll, or prospect of a long drive through Cumberland, probably...
Comment box
Scope: comment response, information
Tone: neutral,encyclopedic
Opinion: not really
Sarcasm/humor: none
So in my case the toll is purely detrimental to the environment: all it does is incentivize me to use more gas.
The PA turnpike toll, or prospect of a long drive through Cumberland, probably subconsciously shapes the number of times you travel from DC to Ohio by car. The choice feels slightly onerous either way, so you will not do it particularly often. If the toll were free, it would feel "easier" to go to Ohio by car, and you might be incentivize to do it more often.
On the net, an increased quantity of trips would probably result in more gas emissions than fewer, but slower trips through Cumberland.
In traffic engineering this is called ''''induced demand'''', meaning changing the parameters of the system to artificially create demand where there was none before. More specifically, all transportation trips have a fungible mode. There may be only one obvious choice but the choice always still exists. The likelihood of switching between modes relates to a trip's elasticity. In general, traffic is highly elastic (dynamic). While there are morning and evening commute peaks in many urbanized areas, most drivers can be easily incentivized to drive at different times and along different routes to smooth out demand, especially because many trips that happen to take place during rush hour are not actually commuting trips (work patterns increasingly do not follow 9-5 schedules). And most long-distance highway driving is almost completely elastic, as you have pointed out. This means that it's feasible to induce a shift from car to other modes for the majority of trips. It also goes the other way, and our current society has induced substantial auto demand mostly at the expense of train demand.
Demand can be altered by:
Expand Box - Demand induction factors/criteria
Travel time
Any factor that reduces the start-end distance of a trip reduces travel time and is therefore an incentive to drive, and the opposite disincentives. This includes intentional or accidental road closures (reduce demand) as well as building more highway bypasses (induce demand). Likewise, for a train, a straighter track induces ridership (environmentally good) because it reduces mileage. For an airplane, direct flights reduce travel distance.
Any factor that allows for higher speeds also reduces travel time. Higher speed limits are an incentive to drive, as well as being extremely environmentally unfriendly (engines are less efficient at higher speeds; all cars, including EVs, also face more wind friction at high speeds). Anything like "traffic calming" reduces "Level of Service" { LOS }, which is the limited-access highway terminology that traffic engineers incorrectly extrapolate on local streets. Lower speed limits on highways would reduce demand for driving by making alternatives, like the currently slow train, relatively faster. For a bus, a dedicated bus lane (Bus Rapid Transit) eliminates traffic bottlenecks and maintains high speeds. For a train, straighter track curves on the single-digit mile level allow for higher operating speeds. Grade separation and other grade crossing improvements also allow for higher legal operating speeds; these all increase ridership. Planes will never get any faster over land routes because of sonic booms.
Connection time is a factor in travel time. We usually pretend this doesn't exist for driving, but it does: rest stops. The longer one drives, the more one must stop, get out of the vehicle, and get back in; it's just coincidentally the same vehicle, which has no mathematical significance. (Some individuals may destroy their bodies by not stopping for 8+ hours at a time, but they are statistically minor and canceled out in a roughly normal distribution by people who stop frequently.) We have incentivized shorter driving connection times by building highway rest stops, but it is impossible to reduce this further in a socially acceptable/non-gross way. Refueling is also a connection which increases travel time. These particular connection times do not exist for trains/planes; the vehicle continues moving even when passengers use the toilet, and they do not typically refuel mid-journey (ignoring layover complexity).
Congestion increases travel time. This is an incentive not to drive. Ironically, eliminating congestion by raising supply (more road lanes) induces demand in all urban/suburban areas and most rural areas, so ironically some congestion can keep traffic from getting worse, in aggregate. (PA's new auto-toll system reduces toll queueing-related congestion emissions slightly, but the higher LOS induces enough demand to cancel that out.) Train congestion (being stuck behind another train) obviously also increases travel time, so eliminating the issue with a third or fourth track solves the problem; and for planes, taxiing efficiency. Physically expanding train and plane infrastructure induces demand for those modes.
Financial cost
Tolls are a psychologically significant cost - less so with auto-tolling, but it's still there. It feels worse to be tolled than to wear down your car driving longer distances, or statistically increase your chance of crash (see: insurance) by driving longer distances. Now, if tolls are applied to state highways as well as interstate highways, drivers have no incentive to take longer routes; they will merely be incentivized to drive less. This requires coordination between governments.
Fuel is a psychologically significant cost, perhaps more than tolls. This is a reason EVs are often desirable, if home charging is available. Currently it is impossible not to spend any money on fuel, even though it's usually possible to avoid some tolls. A fuel tax reduces demand for longer drives and makes tolling less relatively effective, and higher tolls make the fuel tax less relatively effective; both, whether alone or combined, make driving less competitive against other modes and reduce demand for driving.
Cost of ownership and maintenance: purchase price/auto loan, depreciation, repairs, registration, insurance. Drivers in auto-centric societies are not cognitively aware that these costs are fungible, ie it is possible for them not to pay them by not owning a vehicle, but the choice still exists, even if it appears uncomfortable or involves moving to a different location or other lifestyle changes.
The above is all rolled into ticket costs for buses, planes, and trains. This reduces the psychological impact of repeatedly paying for fuel or tolls, but the impact of paying for tickets somewhat diminishes that effect, depending on how people buy tickets.
Subjective comfort induces demand. Engineers might call this an "irrational" factor, as in, it is not explained by travel time or financial cost (real resources) because it is strictly experiential and preferential. It is still relevant, but it is much less important than travel time. Transportation modes are fungible
Physical comfort induces demand. This is a big reason trains are attractive over planes, all else equal; they are spacious. This includes the comfort (or lack) of driving vs flying with a group such as a family. Plus many other factors.
Confusion/fear reduces demand. Cultural incentives are an "irrational" reason to drive, such as a fear of being lost in a train station (fear of unknown) or an irrational fear of a train/plane crash despite their comparative safety per-passenger-mile. Inversely, education/familiarity usually induces demand. This is why it's important for children to have experience on multiple modes from a young age.
And other things. But all of those factors can be influenced. The "rational" factors are much easier to influence and have much more uniform & predictable effects than the "irrational" factors. It is necessary to think beyond any particular trip, and rather consider classes of trips, and classes of drivers, when trying to induce a modal shift.
Environmentally, the question to ask is "after setting the toll, to disincentivize driving, how can we apply demand induction factors to incentivize other, more efficient forms of transportation?" Using rough online calculators, we can see that driving is meaningfully cleaner than flying (in other calculators, it is the opposite; I believe carbon offset credit companies like ST inflate flight footprints to encourage you to pay for more carbon offset credits, but let's just go with this). The difference between a car and a train is an order of magnitude, but the difference between a car and plane is, either way, within the same order of magnitude and in fact probably overlapping. Environmentally the best solution is almost always a train, even if it's a diesel train compared to an electric car.
The train is "viable" insofar as it exists, but yes it is terribly slow. This is a result of poor infrastructure funding allocations toward highways instead of railroads. It is physically possible to fix within a decade if funding is provided. In DC, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Ohio, areas of focus would be:
Track improvements. Realignment (straightening sharp curves) improves speeds. At-grade crossing improvements improve safety and allow for higher legal speeds. Full grade separations have high capital cost but massively improve safety and operating speeds, as well as operational efficiency (including for other modes). Max speed is important, but so is average speed, which is influenced by acceleration/deceleration. Removing "slow zones" within faster zones (ie. remove bottlenecks) by prioritizing track straightening and other improvements there is critical, because it avoids the need to brake.
Station improvements. Level boarding platforms significantly reduce "dwell time" at stations. Stairs cause delays; level platforms are seamless. Routing improvements on platforms can also reduce on-board queues and allow for faster embarking and disembarking. Operational efficiency at stations is also relevant, especially the larger Union Station.
Rolling stock. Some old Amtrak rolling stock is inherently inefficient for passenger alighting, like the two-level western cars. Stairs are slow. And newer rolling stock can attain higher max speeds in general, as well as along curves (tilting technology), such as the new Acelas whose max speed increased from 150 mph to 160 mph due to better tilting around curves. In general, catenary electrification allows for lighter trains and higher speeds, but has high capital costs. Battery electrification avoids these capital costs but batteries are heavy and this is not a great solution on many routes; catenary is better. Diesel can still hit 110 mph or so though.
Timetabling. Many travel time issues with trains can be improved by better timetabling. This is very obvious on the Northeast Corridor (NEC), see Alon Levy and Devin Wilkins's excellent report in 2025. This is mostly an issue when coordinating with local transit agencies in big cities, as well as freight trains.
NEC congestion. The NEC does not through-run to Chicago, but some trains from New York go directly to Chicago via Virginia/West Virginia (Cardinal). Also the timeliness of connecting trains (service reliability) impacts ridership. The same also applies to connecting trains around Chicago, which also affect trains in Ohio. This includes mainline Amtrak trains as well as local metro services.
Improving these factors will improve the time-competitiveness of trains. In theory, this can also improve cost-competitiveness by allowing Amtrak to scale service more effectively. For example, longer train cars can fit more passengers for a given trip, improving profitability and reducing ticket prices. Trains can technically be arbitrarily long to suit passenger demand.
Additional negative incentives to reduce air travel demand may be:
Consumer carbon taxes and other taxes (effective and direct)
Higher corporate taxes for air travel (seems less effective to me than a per-mile carbon tax)
Reduce investment in airport rebuilds and halt expansion projects (very effective but less direct)
A tip for people driving through Pennsylvania: getting an E-Z pass can cut the cost of tolls substantially. PA tolls are over twice as much if you rely on them billing you by mail. I assume it’s a...
A tip for people driving through Pennsylvania: getting an E-Z pass can cut the cost of tolls substantially. PA tolls are over twice as much if you rely on them billing you by mail. I assume it’s a way of charging more for people from out of state.
Comment box
This is a huge benefit for society. People are blissfully unaware of the immense financial and social cost of maintaining hundreds of thousands of miles of highway infrastructure. Having a small toll reduces the incentive to drive very slightly, just enough to make someone consider taking alternatives.
Tolls induce a slight mode shift toward other forms of travel, like walking, buses, trains, cycling, ebike, etc., or simply not taking unnecessary trips via car at all. Personal automobiles are a pretty inefficient method of transport, especially on long-distance highways, so a slight prod in the right direction is a good thing.
The poorest people in society do not drive personal vehicles and are the worst-affected by externalities of highways (pollution, traffic violence). Therefore, modest tolls on highways are more equitable than the current subsidy.
Highway tolls are:
Public transit almost always has a small fee. Regional trains almost always charge tickets based on distance traveled. Highway tolls ought to be at least the same, ideally higher. Just like public transit, it would be simple for governments to create a system to accommodate edge cases for people who actually '"need"' toll-free highway travel, but unlike public transit, the number of people this reasonably applies to is probably quite small.
Not necessarily where I would have expected this, but I think this lends credibility to my argument about necessity. This is an actual technical issue, not just an ideological one. Highways and personal vehicle use have so excessively dominated our lives, and municipal spending, that the problem has gotten out of control. Even very partisan-aligned entities are recognizing that something must be done.
Yea god forbid we just have odometer readings done as part of inspections and tax according to total mileage.
This, of course, will never happen because than EZPass won't get a cut.
A pretty sizable number of states don't have vehicle inspections. You'd have to implement that first in many places.
Or even parts of states, and the types of inspections vary. Some parts of Illinois have emissions inspections. Mine doesn't. This is very confusing for parents of students who live on campus whose cars are here and won't get inspected here. (There's a process for this just nothing the university does anything with.)
But other states have more thorough inspections, like brakes, steering, etc. I always assumed that lacking any mountains no one cared here, but I'm sure there's some history
When I moved to Michigan, I asked about vehicle inspections since the state i moved from required them every few years. I was told no inspections are required to renew vehicle registration. I told the person I was surprised since Michigan was the home of the American car industry, and I had expected them to have fairly robust vehicle regulations.
They about laughed themselves onto the floor.
Hazarding a guess that the auto makers are why there are toll roads and vehicle inspections in Michigan.
No, the opposite in fact. They're are no toll roads in Michigan. There are tolls on the international bridge crossings, but no roads. There are also no vehicle inspections required for most cars. Presumably this is due to intensive long term lobbying on the part of the Big 3 auto makers.
Tbh it is pretty spotty, I'm not sure Michigan stands out that much?
Vehicle inspection in the United States - Wikipedia
Illinois only has them for emissions for example, and only near Chicago and St. louis and that's pretty common. Only 14 states have mandatory safety inspections.
Not saying this isn't due to lobbying, I don't know the political push/pull on that, a car that fails inspection is a car that may be replaced after all. But I am surprised it's not more common in the Rockies, as I assumed it had something to do with mountains and such.
Apparently more states used to have inspections, but the decline of full service stations (versus mere gas stations) meant that states were faced with building and running their own inspection centers. On top of that, there’s always political pressure to make driving cheaper.
Got a link to some history on it? I'm intrigued now.
I found a claim that MN got rid of them because cars didn't fail them, for example (rust kills them first). Or that Kansas did because they felt the inspections were mostly residents spending money to mechanics who signed off without inspecting anything and felt modern cars were safer.
I'm just curious since folks have made the claims that this is automaker lobbying, political pressure and costs to the state whether there's any evidence towards that?
In Jersey any certified repair shop can also do inspections. Doesn't need to be the state DMV.
Also.....massive infrastructure is needed to install toll survielance where there currently isn't any.
The point is that NJ requires inspections in the state, not all states do or have that system set up. And mine only has inspections in some of the state and only for emissions in metro STL/CHI areas for example
Come to think of it, pretty much every car made after 2016 could self-report more or less continously.
Not a fan of more spyware, but that's what 'tolls everywhere' adds up to anyhow.
I am personally baffled by the people willing to jump on the libertarian "privatize all roads" train and the "let the cars report more back to the government" train at the same time. Just because it's a train? Both sound horrible to me, even though I'd support a usage tax. (And I live without public transit and have to drive a wheelchair van which is already unaffordable when it's ten years old and isn't electric. )
But idk why you replied this to me, as I was just providing you with information about how inspections are not a universal feature in this country since you seemed to misunderstand the previous poster.
The general thought was 'more than one way to skin a cat' to do mileage based taxes without needing to deploy the inspection system specifically.
I too would prefer less surveilance, but that's likely not an option. A fixed annual fee of $600 annually to own a car would cover the gas tax and then some.
What’s wrong with… just having tolls? Lots of countries, including many touted for having good public infrastructure, have tolls, like Japan and many European countries.
Like, logically, if the goal is to charge cars for driving on a road, it makes more sense to add something to the road than to add something to every car in existence, since there’s a lot more cars than there are roads.
They were usually part of a privatisation kick, and private companies won't pay big bucks unless they receive a promise you won't build alternatives that could undermine their money fountain. Also, said privatisation is often just an excuse to sell a money fountain to the politicians' mates for dirt-cheap (although that won't stop them from demanding the monopoly anyway).
My only qualm with it is that in my area there's no alternative to driving.
The city nearest to me has done pretty well, there's only a toll lane on highways for which there is a pretty good public transport alternative right next to the highway. Doesn't work great for people just passing through the city, but works amazing for people who previously would have had to use the highway to get into the city.
People complain about it, but I like that model.
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In theory, one of the ways to incentivize alternatives to driving at a systemic, societal level is to increase the cost of living in car-dependent places, relative to places with transit/walkability. A carbon tax or a road toll (which is partially a specialized carbon tax), is one such method. Revenue can even be used to fund multimodal capital projects or services, which is a positive incentive (pull factor) to take alternatives.
Negative incentives (push factors) are unpopular because they're perceived as punitive or regressive (truly or falsely). However, they are effective. A road toll is unlikely to cause anyone to move (moving has higher costs), but it is a disincentive for more people to move to a place without multimodal transportation options. This is more important. Paired with other small negative incentives, the total cost becomes high enough to register as a decision when choosing housing, such as living in a townhome nearer work instead of in a home in a disconnected neighborhood which requires daily highway use.
Planners avoid explicitly talking about negative incentives because doing so is political suicide. Individualist libertarians object to the principle of taxation and collectivist social progressives object to the image of dislocating or inconveniencing people (whether that image is real or imagined). But at least some small negative incentives are functionally necessary to overcome cultural inertia: meta-analyses demonstrate that both push and pull factors are necessary to reduce car dependency.
It's much more politically palatable to talk about Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) than any disincentive to drive a car. This means rezoning land surrounding public transit stops (train or bus). This encourages transit ridership and reduces car-dependency by focusing population density along corridors with transportation alternatives. TOD is a great solution and something I advocate for regularly. It's useful for all trips, but especially medium and long-distance ones. There is also such thing as Trail-Oriented Development (TrOD), which is important for walkability/riding bikes for shorter distances.
If you build enough transit-adjacent housing with enough variety to suit cultural expectations, negative incentives are less important to inducing a mode shift away from driving. In practice, it is politically challenging to enact TOD even in progressive places because NIMBY attitudes go beyond any particular political ideology. People irrationally object to change. Progressives find imaginary environmental or gentrification reasons to kill housing projects, conservatives harp on aesthetics or perceived demographic disruption, everyone worries (unscientifically) about traffic. Zoning is also bureaucratic and complex, so citizens rarely participate even if it's important. So, in practice, and per research, it's important to try multiple things.
In this case your neighboring city has implemented the "pull factor" (transit) and is now implementing the "push factor" (highway tolls) as they expand transit services. This is extremely slow -- like, a "beyond your children's lifetimes to fully implement" type of slow. However, it is politically feasible. Ultimately, implementing good projects is more important than designing them to be perfect and then failing to build them.
An ideal mode shift plan would strategically implement positive and negative incentives in an alternating fashion such that it's not an "all or nothing" decision. Ideally people will not notice the negatives so much, or will appreciate the positives at the same time. As an area becomes more multimodal, it becomes more politically feasible to accelerate implementation with bolder visions and more aggressive timelines.
There's a point when the collective incentive to design walkable, transit-connected places gains enough momentum to maintain a relatively dominant political force. This status is a spectrum. In the United States, this is best exemplified in New York City in every borough except Staten Island. It's also becoming true in Los Angeles. This is not strictly a "city thing" -- it's possible to have great connectivity in smaller towns -- but is easier to accomplish in dense areas. Statewide legislation, such as a recent zoning law in California and state funding for capital projects in New York, come with this.
I really appreciate your post, you obviously put a lot of time and effort on researching these policies
You lost me at systemic, societal level. I live in the rural south. People here are poor. Like, poor poor. The politicians know this. I could walk to the corner store, but its a two lane highway and theres no shoulder, much less sidewalk. Some people drive their lawn mower to the grocery store because they have mobility issues.
Hell will freeze over before anyone around here elects anyone that even utters the word “taxes” unless its talking about taxes going down.
So, I really just want a sidewalk to the corner store. Thats what I put on the meeting notes every month. For years. Its slow, like you said, but things move slow around here. I’ll be over the moon if we don’t become Atlanta 2.0
Honestly, the real solution to rural poverty, long term, is to make cities more affordable.
Being poor in a rural area is really, really hard. The difference is that unlike being poor in a city, which is also really hard, being poor in a rural area is hard because of of the nature of the world, rather than because of deliberate political choices.
It's pretty cheap to provide services to people when there are lots of them in a small geographical region. It's really expensive when they're spread out.
Like, most people need a fire truck at their house maybe once, or even less in their entire lives on average. To provide someone with fire services though, you need to put a fire truck close to them, whether they use it or not. That means you need lots of rural fire departments with a truck that just sits there doing nothing 99% of the time.
It's a massively expensive endeavor that rural counties don't have the tax base to pay for, so they're always bankrupt, require federal dollars to subsidize them, and slash services.
If cities didn't have reputations of being dirty, crime ridden, expensive, and difficult to find housing in (all the result of political choices), it would be a lot more attractive to live in the type of place where public services could be provided without requiring massive taxation, and rural areas could be primarily inhabited by people who absolutely need to live there because they work in agriculture, instead of the current situation where it's the only affordable place to live for many people.
It's great when you're healthy enough to work and maintain your own property. Not so much when you aren't. People live out here for the space, but also the way of life. We're just expected to take care of ourselves. A fire on a rural property does mean that you lose everything, the fire dept just can't get there in time to actually save anything. The trick is to just not set your house on fire.
I'm not totally sure what I'm going to do when I become too old to take care of my property, I know I'll sell it, but I can't see myself hating the city any less than I do right now. No salt to those who love the city, it's just loud and there's people everywhere.
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I hope you are able to get your sidewalk built.
Your Rural [Transportation] Planning Organization (R[T]PO) (or similar; might be called a Regional Council or something) or Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) probably maintains a detailed sidewalk inventory and probably has someone whose job it is to coordinate pedestrian infrastructure. (In my region is this DVRPC……) If you haven’t already communicated with yours, they would be a useful contact. These are the federal or state organizations that develop plans and write/acquire grants for capital infrastructure. State Departments of Transportation and local councils often rely on their recommendations to prioritize infrastructure funding allocations. There are differences state-to-state though. Ideally , the sidewalk you want built would get put into a “regional sidewalk plan” of some sort, as a result of pressure from constituents.
There is strength in numbers. A neighborly coalition is more effective than individual requests. Politicians acknowledge voting blocs and can pressure planners to prioritize projects that engaged constituents want.
That's good info, thanks! I don't really think my community knows how to secure funding, there's a lot of grants out there that we're not even trying for.
If it’s that poor/rural, I don’t think there is a need nor the likelihood of tolls being built anyhow. There’s needs to be a lot of traffic to make it worthwhile. Or, if there’s a highway that passes through, just the highway would be tolled.
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Interesting idea, I had not considered that. But isn't it pretty easy to hack into odometers and change them? Would alot of people do that to evade taxes? I'm not sure how hard it would be to enforce that, compared to, enforcing that people have real/non-covered-up license plates (how people avoid tolls).
Odometer tampering is serious business with penalties up to 3 years in jail and fines up to $10k per instance.
There may be serious consequences, but unless there’s serious enforcement it doesn’t change very much. If don’t do something crazy it’s pretty hard to detect.
The laws are entirely designed around people falsifying the odometer for sale. In this case, it’s just your personal vehicle. For sale, you can try to piece together previous records to find inconsistencies. For just a persons car, unless you hire a PI to track them for a month not much you can do.
Some states even do it already
Snips from the notes:
https://archive.is/ZvPtX
From the article:
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I really liked how the express lanes were done in the areas of the SF Bay Area I lived - express lanes really only charged during periods of high congestion, and were free with 2+ people in the car.
I generally dislike the idea of entirely restricting roads based on tolls - IMO, roads should be public-access, and that means they should be free. And I don’t love the idea of third-party companies (like EzPass) taking a cut of the toll.
Ideally, we’d charge something at the DMV based on vehicle weight & miles driven, since the gas tax ignores EVs and apparently is political suicide to raise. But I guess since we don’t have the infrastructure in place for that, toll roads do make sense.
Because I'm not seeing this addressed nearly enough:
Great! The road should be public access, available to all. Now take a stroll through the road (not the sidewalk), and tell me it's currently accessible to all, instead of paved, maintained, widened, paid for, and throwing off excess noise and other pollutants for the exclusive benefit of motorists instead of inhabitants of the area.
The road currently has a toll: it's the price of an automobile, with the costs associated with one. This makes the costs more overt, but also more targeted at those that are benefiting.
As it stands, we're all subsidizing motorists, and enforcement for traffic violations is nowhere close to stringent enough for me to have any sympathy at all for them
Probably for the best. Having some kind of usage based metering is useful for making sure money is allocated where it’s being used. More popular roads = more tolls = more maintenance required.
When I drove in japan the tolls were quite high and frequent and that definitely changed the calculus on train vs car even in the more rural areas. A train ticket can be 4,200 yen and the same distance on toll road would be 3,400 yen. So after gas, often more expensive if you don’t have another person with you.
A personal anecdote of my recent toll road experience that I expect will be more and more common. I recently went through a toll road in Kansas and it has resulted in me complaining to the Kansas Governor's office and Kansas Turnpike Authority which will most likely result in them telling me to go fuck myself. I'm not a resident of Kansas which will further bolster them to tell me to go fuck myself.
They have automated tolling like most places now, not on-road tolling, and they have one fee for people who have K-Tags and an increased fee if they do license plate recognition. Well not going through this toll road would tack an hour onto my route so I decided it was worth it based on the posted prices. As I'm driving up to the toll road there are signs posted telling me where to go to sign up to pay for the toll online, but of course I'm driving so I can't sign up while I'm driving.
I ended up signing up within 48 hours, which I figured was adequate. I was probably driving for at least another 5 hours after going through that toll road, was tired and fell asleep right away after stopping on the drive, and then immediately resuming the drive the next morning and driving all day.
In any case, I eventually go on the site, sign up, put in my car information and license plate following all instructions the site told me to do, and then I waited. The last toll road I went on somewhere else that I can't recall now, it took them like a month to assign the toll fee to my account but they eventually did it. So I was not entirely surprised after a few weeks that for this Kansas Turnpike toll that they hadn't assigned the toll fee yet.
Then about 1.5 months later, I receive two mailed bills, duplicate letters in separate envelopes, both dated for 1st of December (I went through the toll road on October 18th). I checked my account online and saw there was no fees. I look at the mailed bills and the account number shown on there differs from the account number assigned to me online. The mailed bills also conveniently show that they charge $1.50 for mailing fees, and of course since they mailed it twice at once it has 2 of those fees. They also listed the toll charge as $0, but the past due amount was $5.52 which then made it hard for me to determine if that was the full toll amount or if they also were tacking on late fees in there.
What bothers me about this is, I followed all the posted instructions, and they somehow concocted a system where it doesn't assign the toll fees to the account I created on their site, then tacks on additional fees, obscures the real toll cost, and when I submit a dispute on their site, they ignore it. Then I call them and the support rep says the best they can do is move the fees over from the one account that was associated with the mailed bills over to the account I made on their site, but they couldn't remove the extra fees, and conveniently they have to close the dispute I opened online before in order to accomplish this task. The support rep tells me that shortly after I drive through and it reads my license plate, it already begins the process of creating an account and starting the billing process for that. So if that is to be believed, before I had created the account online but after I drove through the toll road, it had already created an account for me and began this other process. So I guess their system conveniently does not notify you of this when you put in your vehicle information online, well before they've generated a single mailed statement.
So I open another dispute online, and they tell me similar BS and that they won't or can't remove the fees. Granted I don't really care about the $3 (or more, since it's really not clear what all the charges actually are) that much, but its the principle for me. That $3 to one individual is not much, but to them, for all the people driving through that toll road, is likely significant, and I assume they crafted this bullshit intentionally to extract additional fees from people as it is likely a significant revenue boost.
I tried contacting some office of the governor that oversees the Kansas Turnpike Authority, and of course they send me some bullshit about how they are referring my complaint over to the KTA, though they haven't responded yet.
These automated toll roads are seemingly ripe for abuse, because they can make up whatever they want after you've driven through and there's no recourse.
I kind of doubt it actually. It's more likely it's the result of buerocratic disorganization. These projects are often rushed and underfunded. There were probably a series of errors that had no QA process in place to catch them, and they have no remediation process in place to fix it. There's definitely someone within their billing process with enough power and knowledge to understand your problem and fix it, but good luck getting through the call center to actually get to that person. This kind of thing is ridiculously common in government, but it's usually not on purpose. It's just incompetence.
It isn't clear to me what this concluding sentence to the article means.
They’re implying that it’s ironic that Republicans would be against tolls since giving things away for free, resulting in long lines, is what communist states were known for.
Toll roads are often built with private partnership, where the state provides the real estate and favorable bond tax treatment, and a private set of investors are responsible for building and operating the toll road and take on the risk (and profit) from tolling revenue.
If the government was to remove tolls on these roads ("give them away"), they would need buy out the private companies currently operating them. Because demand for free things is so high, you would see traffic jams ("queues") on those toll roads.
I mean, in PA at least I've never met anybody deterred from using the PA Turnpike (RT 76) because the alternative is 10x more driving. Removing all the tolls would just make for smoother driving.
Hi, it's me, one of those drivers. When going home to Ohio from the DC area for the holidays, I will often opt to add more than an hour to the trip by taking the southern route through Cumberland instead of paying the usurious PA turnpike tolls.
I would take the train in a heartbeat if it was viable, but every time I look into it the itinerary is twice as long as driving and usually more expensive than a flight. A Greyhound would take many extra hours compared to driving either route. So in my case the toll is purely detrimental to the environment: all it does is incentivize me to use more gas.
I've also taken that route for the same reasons. Plus, have even one more person traveling with you and anything but driving doesn't make much sense at all.
The train is at least somewhat comfortable IME but when I do have to fly I hate it so much. I haven't tried Greyhound but I genuinely get pretty car sick when not being the driver of the vehicle. This combined with my personal life reasons is one of the reasons I don't travel a lot anymore. Hopefully I can get an electric car with my next purchase. And that'll work maybe.. But the wheelchair van will still be a gas guzzling giant albatross around my neck
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Greyhound is alright but I would rather take the train for trips above 2-3 hours.
I guess you already know this but you can reduce carsickness by sitting at the front of the bus. Greyhound lets you purchase a specific seat ticket for like $2 extra. I recommend sitting in a location where you can see out of the front of the bus (aisle seat), but the windows near the front are ok. This reduces your brain's overemphasis on lateral motion. Source: I used to get carsick. I don't anymore but that was a big help when I did.
Are there not electric vans that would suit your accessibility needs? Or are they just too expensive?
I get carsick in the driver's seat, mostly because I can't just sit and not do anything for hours so anything that pulls my head down like reading, phone, etc. leads me to nausea. And personally without driving I can't pay attention to the road to avoid it. And that's best case. Trains and planes I'm usually ok on. But they move differently and you can walk around on a train.
In 2023, a 2014 Grand Caravan with wheelchair conversion cost us 30k with only 30k miles on it. 9-19 year old wheelchair vans still run 25-30k. Even with 200k miles. And the cost varies depending on the modifications. He can't drive or transfer so he has specific needs.
I haven't seen an electric wheelchair van personally, but new gas powered ones (aka new vans modified) run 65-90k, so usually add 10-30k for the mods to that electric vehicle (are there even electric consumer vans?). I can't afford that. It's half of the cost of my house. Functionally I can't afford to replace the current vehicles I have, until I pay the van off at least.
a part where I go on a bit about the frustrations of accessibility and why I think people engage in ableism while on anti-car crusades
Partner can't drive, uses a power wheelchair and can't self transfer, but his assistant can drive when he has one. So I have a vehicle for work and a van for him. This maybe wouldn't be needed if we didn't live in a small town outside the city I work in but it was the only place I found a house mostly wheelchair accessible. And even then he has appointments with specialists in other cities.
A wheelchair accessible transport costs like $35 each way in town, and renting a wheelchair vehicle for a day is about $150 (and is also in another city).
Had I been able to find a place to live in the city, I'd still probably need the wheelchair van, public accessible transit is unreliable, and we've had so many evening/overnight trips to the ER that without a van he'd be stuck in the hospital without his chair, because ambulances also don't have ramps. That means coming home in an ambulance. That's not cheap either.
And when people talk about how pedestrians are getting screwed by the streets and such, sidewalks, even "nice" ones, suck for wheelchair users. Even the safety bumps on the ramps for visually impaired people make every intersection painful for my partner. The road is usually better but not always. And the snow and ice? Most people don't fully clear their sidewalks even if they try. A lack of personal vehicles without extensive pre-investment into infrastructure (and reinvestment as weather and salt degrades them) will make disabled people have to stay at home.
And NO ONE ever comes to their "presentation* of how much cars suck with a plan for this in hand. I never see even a mention of expanding door to door accessible transit service or addressing rural/semi-rural residents who cannot reasonably move. Or see people assume and address that disabled people want the same travel options - to travel independently or with people, even if public transit was the primary option.
If we were married we wouldn't be able to afford any of this because he would lose Medicaid. If he didn't have me, he wouldn't be able to afford any of this because he's on disability. He'd end up in a nursing home and he'd die.
Cars aren't independence just because of weird American values. I'd love to go back to being able to walk to work. I love walking to the grocery store (when I can, since I can't afford to only shop there). Build a more accessible world and I swear I'll do my best to use it. But build a world that only tries to make change by privatizing roads and lacking sympathy for motorists and far worse statements I've flagged from anti-car folks here and elsewhere? Fuck that.
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Yeah I see how that is exorbitantly expensive.
Rant taken, you are right to express frustration at me.
Helping disabled people helps everyone so I agree it's important to implement. In the context of tolls, I would probably want to exempt disabled users, which should be relatively easy to technically implement. From a traffic volume perspective such an exemption is insignificant, but the benefit to disabled people is meaningful.
Response to going on a bit about anti-car crusades
Oh , well , this is a topic of regular conversation in my circles. The tree roots in the sidewalks are probably the most egregious issue, as well as cracked bricks and other blatant ADA violations. My city has at least installed curb cuts in most places.
In my opinion the big problem here is that sidewalks are legally considered the property of the landowner, even though they are a public Right of Way. Property owners have zero incentive to maintain sidewalks to an ADA standard unless they are old or disabled or happen to be very altruistic. Other than fining people for not maintaining their sidewalks -- and people HATE fines and HOA-esque fees even more than they hate road tolls -- I do not know what the solution is to this except for the government to seize control of all sidewalks. This is surely extremely unpopular among libertarians and also unpopular among government (who don't want to pay for all these sidewalks). In some cities this has already been accomplished, such as Boston and DC, but not in New York and San Francisco. There is a lot of state-by-state difference in the laws. Rectifying that one issue of sidewalk responsibility universally in all 50 states, by itself, would be an extremely worthy but lifelong/multi-generational campaign for a dedicated organization.
I've never considered negative impacts of tactile bumps. I am not sure how to resolve that from a strictly engineering/materials/design perspective. If the surface has to be bumpy enough for blind people to feel it through thick soles, I don't know how it could also be designed to be gentle for wheelchairs.
I advocate for "raised crosswalks" where the crosswalk is at sidewalk level and basically part OF the sidewalk. Cars are forced to slow because of the built-in speed cushion. Perhaps this eliminates the need for tactile bumps - or they could have them at the edges of the raised crosswalk to either side to stop people from veering into the street, but not directly ahead as you cross the street. Or perhaps not because cars are still what kill Vulnerable Road Users at intersections, even if they're going slower, maybe they're still necessary.
In my city, bike advocates have started calling bike lanes "mobility lanes" in disability context, and trying to explicitly include disability access as a reason to install more bike lanes. We see a lot of wheelchair users choosing to use asphalt bike lanes for the reasons you describe. Riding a bike over bumpy surfaces is also unpleasant, so it's a natural alliance. So far there aren't any complaints from bikers. As long as they have a way to pass wheelchair users, it's ok. So maybe the best solution is more and wider protected bike lanes with mid-block curb cuts (without tactile markers?). Or maybe just 1 tactile marker is ok if you can avoid the rest of them while traveling along streets in a bike/mobility lane?
I'm guessing you live outside a city because it's cheaper? We should be building enough urban housing for everyone to afford an apartment with an elevator or accessible townhome if they need it. My city is OK about this but there is just so much NIMBY obstruction to increasing the housing supply. Zoning is like a war.
Unfortunately I have seen that some opponents to housing, and opponents to safety improvements for wheelchair users/bike users, use "accessibility impacts" as a reason to block obviously beneficial infrastructure, such as physical separation of mobility lanes from car traffic. In a recent case in my city these opponents also fought against loading zones to improve accessibility for drivers (including disabled passengers) because it was part of a 'bike lane' project. It is dishonest and cruel in my opinion.
In principle I do not believe individuals should be responsible for this. I think the government should just do it. They plow roads, they can clear sidewalks.
In practice this is an unresolved question. Personally I think there are a few necessary steps:
In Minnesota they have skywalks between many downtown buildings to allow for access in snow conditions. In Buffalo they have many tunnels. I am doubtful that tunnels and skywalks are a realistic solution outside of urban centers and university campuses.
If a disabled person lived in a home with some sort of covering for the walkway to access the curb, a transit or paratransit vehicle could support them. For example an urban apartment. Or if they live on a street with a bike lane, they can use the bike lane, because the municipal vehicles would have cleared it just as well as the roads. In theory. Still need mid-block curb cuts and stuff like that to work.
I don't think any urbanists object to paratransit, especially for this purpose, even if they object to "cars." In practice the issue is volume of cars, not existence per se, even if people wax about cars as a class of vehicles. There is often talk of retractable bollards and so forth to allow for emergency vehicle access on appropriate corridors, and I think in any situation where "cars are banned" in some hypothetical, almost anyone seriously interested in urbanism would consider paratransit part of that exception matrix.
Anything in particular that a good accessible transit service has/offers in your opinion? Or avoids doing? I am wondering if there are ways my city could do this better. We have a paratransit service which goes anywhere the buses/trains go. So not door-to-door technically, unless you live by a bus stop, but the network is relatively extensive at least.
The big problem in my city is that we can't even fund our regular transit system. I think if we asked anyone in my advocacy group they would be willing to put out CTAs for paratransit expansion specifically, but it would be basically the same as the existing CTA for transit funding. In this case the legislators who are blocking transit care even less about paratransit so the political approach is not clear to me. In my experience urbanists who are actually involved in political lobbying are receptive to disability needs more so than random people on the internet, but we can still do better. I recently connected with a particularly vocal disability advocate on "Linked - In" social media and seeing his posts every day is very helpful to me.
I don't think there is any consensus among urbanists about how to "help" disabled people in rural areas beyond solutions that also apply to cities. We all know that unfortunately that disability happens "in place" as well as by birth, which means anyone can become disabled at any time and be stuck where they are. So I don't think "addressing" this problem can be accomplished by anything less than a whole-scale societal revamp of land use and taxation to ensure that fewer people live in places that are (structurally) functionally impossible to serve with accessible resources.
The only other, or additional, solution I see is a deep rejection of societal individuality and instead adopting a grassroots community support mechanism whereby local communities go out of their way to help disabled neighbors thrive. I participate in this personally but I cannot change a culture and neither can the urbanist bloc. What I can advocate for is a built environment where people live close enough together to incentivize communal support systems and make them more practical. In my opinion this does not require everyone to live in a city, but does require almost everyone to live in or quite near a town. Culturally many people object to that and will never accept it, so I am at a loss.
The only approach anyone agrees on is to build enough accessible housing in cities and towns to house everyone if they want to live there. But some/many people simply dislike being near other people, categorically. They do not like cities, and they do not like towns, and they do not like being 'supported' by government systems, and so I do not know what to do about those people as they age and become disabled 'in-place'. Regarding transportation I am inclined to ignore them, because if a person is socially conditioned to dislike society, no solution I can possibly present will be acceptable to them.
Universal healthcare would help a lot. Among urbanists, probably every single one supports it wholeheartedly. That particular problem is beyond my lobbying knowledge or abilities. It is personally my #1 or #2 criterion when I vote but I am not capable of helping the movement otherwise.
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The PA turnpike toll, or prospect of a long drive through Cumberland, probably subconsciously shapes the number of times you travel from DC to Ohio by car. The choice feels slightly onerous either way, so you will not do it particularly often. If the toll were free, it would feel "easier" to go to Ohio by car, and you might be incentivize to do it more often.
On the net, an increased quantity of trips would probably result in more gas emissions than fewer, but slower trips through Cumberland.
In traffic engineering this is called ''''induced demand'''', meaning changing the parameters of the system to artificially create demand where there was none before. More specifically, all transportation trips have a fungible mode. There may be only one obvious choice but the choice always still exists. The likelihood of switching between modes relates to a trip's elasticity. In general, traffic is highly elastic (dynamic). While there are morning and evening commute peaks in many urbanized areas, most drivers can be easily incentivized to drive at different times and along different routes to smooth out demand, especially because many trips that happen to take place during rush hour are not actually commuting trips (work patterns increasingly do not follow 9-5 schedules). And most long-distance highway driving is almost completely elastic, as you have pointed out. This means that it's feasible to induce a shift from car to other modes for the majority of trips. It also goes the other way, and our current society has induced substantial auto demand mostly at the expense of train demand.
Demand can be altered by:
Expand Box - Demand induction factors/criteria
And other things. But all of those factors can be influenced. The "rational" factors are much easier to influence and have much more uniform & predictable effects than the "irrational" factors. It is necessary to think beyond any particular trip, and rather consider classes of trips, and classes of drivers, when trying to induce a modal shift.
Environmentally, the question to ask is "after setting the toll, to disincentivize driving, how can we apply demand induction factors to incentivize other, more efficient forms of transportation?" Using rough online calculators, we can see that driving is meaningfully cleaner than flying (in other calculators, it is the opposite; I believe carbon offset credit companies like ST inflate flight footprints to encourage you to pay for more carbon offset credits, but let's just go with this). The difference between a car and a train is an order of magnitude, but the difference between a car and plane is, either way, within the same order of magnitude and in fact probably overlapping. Environmentally the best solution is almost always a train, even if it's a diesel train compared to an electric car.
The train is "viable" insofar as it exists, but yes it is terribly slow. This is a result of poor infrastructure funding allocations toward highways instead of railroads. It is physically possible to fix within a decade if funding is provided. In DC, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Ohio, areas of focus would be:
Improving these factors will improve the time-competitiveness of trains. In theory, this can also improve cost-competitiveness by allowing Amtrak to scale service more effectively. For example, longer train cars can fit more passengers for a given trip, improving profitability and reducing ticket prices. Trains can technically be arbitrarily long to suit passenger demand.
Additional negative incentives to reduce air travel demand may be:
A tip for people driving through Pennsylvania: getting an E-Z pass can cut the cost of tolls substantially. PA tolls are over twice as much if you rely on them billing you by mail. I assume it’s a way of charging more for people from out of state.