Toll Roads Are Spreading in America
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As America's roads become increasingly congested, toll roads are on the rise, sparking a heated debate about fairness and infrastructure funding. Some commenters, like lotsofpulp, argue that paying for road usage is a fair way to allocate costs, while others point out that it disproportionately affects lower-income individuals. A consensus emerges that the current gas tax system is outdated, with many suggesting alternative solutions like an odometry tax or weight-based tiered registration fees to account for the damage caused by heavier vehicles, particularly trucks. The discussion highlights the complexities of road funding and the need for a more nuanced approach that balances fairness and infrastructure maintenance.
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If the retort to this is it impacts poorer people more, then that is a separate problem fixed by redistributing more cash, so that the wealth gap is smaller.
Also higher gas taxes for carbon reasons.
As a consequence, personal cars barely register.
It would make sense to collect toll from trucks only, and possibly weigh them all, because overloaded trucks are extra damaging to the road.
Probably, due to the small size of RI, it will just cause goods not bound directly for RI to divert along I-395 up through CT and MA, and I-290 and I-495 in MA.
We've ended up, though, with a growing wealth gap and more tolls.
Yep. It's great that I have to pay to use this stretch of I-90 and then on top of that if I end up at the wrong rest area on a Sunday I won't be able to access every vendor (because they picked Chick-Fil-A at some locations).
* HOT lanes in the Bay Area: they allocate demand efficiently and subsidize multi-people transport. I wish there were more.
* Toll roads in Texas: you can take the slip roads almost everywhere but they’re slow. The highways were fast but you had to pay.
Overall, I think fare at point of use is a great structure. In the past we couldn’t enforce it but now we can do this for more things.
The only problem is that we’ve decided that impounding cars that don’t have license plates or which have license plate covers is unacceptable because the poor do this most frequently. I hope we will clean up enforcement and then we will have the right incentives here.
I don’t like that it creates separate classes of infrastructure for citizens based on their ability to pay. Even the non-toll highways had an HOT-like lane you paid per-use to drive on that was often significantly faster than the free lanes.
It makes a system where I suspect many people won’t want to pay to upgrade the free infrastructure because they don’t use it, and people who can’t afford the daily tolls waste even more time in traffic. The fast pass lane are even worse because they cannibalize lanes that could be used to alleviate general traffic (and were typically sparsely used).
The tolls were substantial for some people. $3-$8 a day on toll roads (ie no fast pass lane). At $8 a day, that’d be $40 a week, ~$160/month. That’s nearly 20% of the weekly pre-tax income of someone making Austin’s $22/hr minimum wage.
But ... government income is largely dependent on the rich, and government spending largely benefits the poor. This is what is always forgotten about it. The reason debt is such a thorny issue is that debt really benefited the poor. And over time, so will these toll roads.
The reason toll roads benefit the poor is that the rich don't travel anyways, and this gives extra economic options to the poor. A large portion will figure out how to use this extra economic option (because that was thoroughly checked before the bridge was even built, and it wouldn't have been built if the answer wasn't that they would)
So both the building of the bridge, and the use of it almost exclusively benefit the poor.
If you want cars off the road, you tax rich people and build trains and bike lanes, and shut down cynical RTO. Full stop.
This is almost diametrically opposite to parking-oriented cities and sprawling suburbia.
... you, after millions of foreign nationals pile into European cities, terrorizing men, women, children and old people with rape, murder, gang rape, plunder, assault, and general pillage of public coffers being emptied out to them by corrupt politicians using it to enrich themselves."
Every time I attempt to read it, halfway through my brain flips into the mode that is normally reserved for when people start telling me that Ivermectin is a COVID remedy, or something equally farcical.
Note that this holds without even having to mention that holding the ability for millions of people to be independent and mobile without needing to purchase and maintain a vehicle against a niche and expensive hobby is ridiculous. But there's no need to bring that up because we can have both.
The first two smell like communism, the last massively harms the rich people and their playthings (REITs - real estate investment trusts). Won't happen, not in countries where Big Money is pulling the strings (i.e. the US, Germany and UK).
Driving and public transport is not a business, it is a civil service.
Should we begin to offer tiered plans for EMS as well?
It seems like a good property that someone who uses something the most pays the most.
If something has positive externalities such as vaccines or education then I’m fine subsidizing or making it free, but traffic has negative externalities.
We do sort of have tiered EMS with insurance and ambulance costs. When my buddy came to the US from India, he was told, "unless you're blessing out, call an Uber to the ER."
If you want to raise the money to buy land and build a private highway, price segment away. If you want to price segment a publicly owned and operate commons, it needs to be in the public interest.
You can argue about popularity if you want, the topic is actually about whether they're "in the public interest" though.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges...
>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.
So apparently that's how the owner intends to raise the money and build. Beyond that, "who should pay for government spending" is of course the perennial discussion, and exactly what we are debating right now.
Anyway, the point is not about the precedent but whether it is sensible. And that's not to imply that I love the country being sold off to billionaires and corporations right now. For medical care I go the other direction - we need the government funded base offering.
Getting better government services logically follows from paying more for them, but the idea is so sacrilegious and alien that people would probably riot.
idea: Maximize the income of the toll lane and use the money to subsidize new free lanes or other forms of mass transit.
We saw this very clearly recently with the Manhattan congestion road tax. $9 paid no more than once per day to drive into Lower Manhattan is close to nothing by NYC standards, yet traffic still dropped substantially and stayed suppressed.
If you want to help poor people, tax and then redistribute. Don’t make a million small rules and discounts that make things less efficient and our society poorer.
That, in fact, isn't always true.
In Austin, for example, I-45 was supposed to have "frontage roads" all along it so that people could avoid the toll road if they chose at the expense of going through a few traffic lights.
Gee, guess what somehow magically never got built in many sections of I-45? So, your options are pay the toll or go a LONG way out of the way in order to avoid it since the construction of the tollway also destroyed the old routes.
This seems out of touch and without sources. What’s with everyone’s love for strawmanning the poor?
It's maybe not "fair" that some people can use this option indiscriminately every day, but at least it is an option that everyone has access to. There's no physical barrier stopping you from using the Texas toll roads if you really needed to in an emergency. All that will happen is a bill will appear in your mailbox about 30 days later. If you choose to not pay it, the chances something bad will happen are approximately zero.
And it could be made ineffective as regional expansion continues. As soon as enough people who are willing to pay the toll saturates you end up with the same issue (“just one more lane bro”)
Another effective way to control highway congestion is to get people off of highways and invest in your transit system, make it better than driving so that people don’t drive as often.
But maybe Houston is too far gone for that.
For comparison, the Chicago red line extension project adds 5 miles of heavy rail for about twice the cost, so 4x more per mile. But the Houston toll lane project doesn’t do anything positive for property values like new rail stations does. Chicago will get money back from more property taxes and the new stations will relieve traffic on the Dan Ryan.
Transit lines get faster as ridership increases due to the ability to increase schedule frequency, the exact opposite of highways.
Increase the toll prices to reduce congestion, increase the number of buses on that route, and use some of the money for either expanding the road or building another more-or-less parallel road.
This stretch of road is already using congestion/dynamic pricing. I've never had to go slower than 85mph the entire way.
[1]the kind who have so few problems that freeway proximity makes it high on the list of things that inform where they choose to live
Light rail has been there since before the toll lanes.
This is not a small medical center, some of the hospitals are skyscrapers.
Houston’s red line has similar ridership levels to Chicago’s third busiest L line.
The two metro areas have a very similar population.
In Houston the rail does not actually extend to any suburbs, if they have that in Chicago it would probably make a big difference.
I got the idea when they were building it in Houston that a large bit of the Metro system is geared toward transporting people in lower-income areas who can't afford cars, so they can gain employment downtown and in the med center.
When it comes to toll roads most suburbs have a long-established freeway commute, but directly west from downtown a major suburb is known as the International District containing a large concentration of immigrants. The only traffic solution leading in that direction was built as a tollway instead.
It all started with the Beltway 8 toll bridge with toll that was cheaper than the gas saved by taking alternate routes.
By now the toll road authority has expanded and embraced a growth mindset for so long, and in recent years gotten so expensive, that any upcoming candidate for County Judge may be able to prevail on a single-issue of lowering the tolls alone.
This is how most US cities view public transit: poor people only.
Only a handful of US cities treat it as something that everyone uses, places like NYC, Chicago, DC, and Boston.
Houston should have an equivalent to the Metra or MBTA commuter rail.
It just happens to have a competent transit system that gets heavy use. If it didn’t it would have much bulkier highway infrastructure like Houston.
Chicago has a lot of areas in its boundaries that are basically middle class single family home suburbs, but what it has that Houston doesn’t is a preserved grid system rather than subdevelopments that break up street networks to make them difficult to traverse on foot.
Take a look at Chicago’s bus network map and you’ll see how this setup makes transit to “suburbs” extremely feasible. The buses all just run on the grid in walkable increments in a way that would be impossible with subdivision based development.
You Americans are so funny. Japan is hotter and more humid yet public transit and walking are not an issue. Taipei similar story, rapidly building out rail in a hotter place.
You build the rail, then upzome the areas around stations and over time those giant ashfault lots go away and become urban centres.
Is it?
https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/9247~143809/Comparison-of...
I mean, ideally, I could say I want to live all on my own in a mansion far away from everyone else. But I still want access to the world's best food, entertainment, and socialization. But it's just not possible.
Everything is compromises. We can't be erecting hundreds of miles of road and acres of parking lots so people have a 10 by 10 foot lawn, you know? And ultimately it will come back to them, too. Because commuting does suck, and I think most people know it sucks. They just can't, or won't, put two and two together on their lifestyle and commuting. They're inherently linked!
I'm being harsh, Houston isn't completely terrible. There is a lot of culture and diversity. But you can't really get to it because everything is too far, and you're already tired from commuting 10 hours that week.
Meaning, I don't think people are commuting 2 hours or three or whatever because they LIKE to. Rather, they're victims of poor poor urban design, and most of them, too, would prefer not that.
I don't think a single soul is moving to Houston because of the commute. They're doing it in spite of the commute. But wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to do that?
I do think there is room for more these "New Urbanist" style developments which I have seen a few of in Texas. w the builder puts retail buildings centralized in the development. Lots of real parks and other type of shared resources for the community. Something where you still have a house with a yard but you can walk to the coffee shop in your neighborhood.
People like you are funny too but its easy to make posts like yours. Density in most urban parts of Japan and Taipei are wildly higher than say a Houston Texas. Again like I said, you are oversimplifying the problem which I get it, its easy to do. I don't think this is as simple as "build the rail, then upzone the area around stations", would happy to be wrong but I think like all of the world there are cultural and historical reasons for the difference.
It would take decades, you need buy in from both tax payers, commercial buildings, retail spaces, home builders etc.
It would be great if you could have a central planner like a China to just build a city with all the infrastructure in place but in places like America, that does not happen and so its a very tough egg to crack. Keep in mind its not just about being hot, definitely lots of Japan and Taiwan are very humid but you are also in city centers that have 8-9x the density of Houston. Lots of things to do and often you are most likely not walking that far, relative for city walking. I could walk a mile in Houston and still have not left my starting spot.
A rail system, no matter how fast and efficient, can never get close to matching that.
Sure you can find plenty of random places it would take longer for me to get to by train, but for places I actually want to get to, the subway is faster.
I live in the DC area which has an excellent Metrorail system, and it is still nowhere near close enough to being able to replace the average trip by car unless you in DC proper.
Now imagine how much worse things would be in Houston.
Spoiler: All of them should be this way
Absent that we'll need to wait for population growth (not happening, if anything we're going the other way) or immigration (ha) to fill our cities up to NYC density.
Note that NYC itself used to be even more dense than it is today. No other U.S. city is likely to reach even NYC's current density in any near- to medium-time scale.
Nope: One need only wait for the financial collapse that is fast approaching nearly every municipality in the US due to the relative scale of infrastructure buildout + maintenance as compared to its tax base.
The "standard" American city is 100% unambiguously completely financially impossible.
This is obscured by the fact that cities traditionally account for their infrastructure as depreciating assets whose value goes to zero rather than as perpetual liabilities with exponentially increasing maintenance costs.
Nice snark though!
It costs money which taxpayers don't want to pay (unless it benefits them personally,) it requires long term planning which governments are incapable of, and it smells like socialism.
Seems like a pretty ideal system. Having that extra lane wouldn’t solve any issues for most drivers. For high occupancy or those willing to pay, it does.
> I can look over and see that more than half of the drivers are in violation, and yet it is effectively unenforced.
OTOH, I don't know how you could effectively enforce that single occupant vehicles are paying.
It's something that isn't straight obvious though. When I got there I also thought that people were just in violation of the people requirement.
I don't get the point of the occupancy reader if there's no hard-requirement of 3+ in the current zone. Maybe there are some stricter HOV-only lanes nowadays? I left the bay area in late 2023
The standard Econ solution is to set a price that maximizes throughput. At least some toll roads are attempting to hit that price.
https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freewaymgmt/hovguidance/chapter4.ht...
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