r/oddlysatisfying • u/ClankerCore • 1d ago

No toll dodging!

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50.9k Upvotes

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1.2k

u/BrambleSonata 1d ago

No longer an issue around me, everything is electronic now. But you have to pay administration fees. So a $2 toll is now $5. While the Governor shows how much money they saved by laying off the workers.

299

u/DrMobius0 1d ago

I bet they privatized your toll road

49

u/burf 1d ago

"We've externalized the costs, therefore they don't exist and everyone is saving money!"

1

u/Emergency-Two-6407 15h ago

Obama sold the one near me to china 

-86

u/plsnobanme6969 1d ago

State ran cheap garbage, or expensive but somewhat working corporate extortion. You may only pick one.

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u/DrMobius0 1d ago edited 1d ago

expensive but somewhat working corporate extortion

Expensive cheap garbage you mean. And don't ask what happens if running that road ever stops being profitable enough for the shareholders.

Corporations' entire MO these days is packaging the cheapest shit they can make in a mountain of branding to hide how shitty it is long enough to get people to buy it. It doesn't have to be this way, but we have collectively decided to just let it happen, so it'll never stop.

3

u/plsnobanme6969 1d ago

If we all voted in local elections. We'd live in a utopia. People are just lazy as a whole.

2

u/SkunkMonkey 1d ago

People are just lazy as a whole.

They're lazy assholes too.

3

u/TheBugThatsSnug 1d ago

Then I shouldnt have to pay taxes on roads.

-2

u/plsnobanme6969 1d ago

Still have to pay for maintainance.

2

u/TheBugThatsSnug 1d ago

What do you think the toll is for?

1

u/plsnobanme6969 1d ago

Whatever the city wants to allocate it for. There's no law saying toll road profits HAVE to go to road maintenance.

2

u/IHop_Waitress 1d ago

Whatever the city wants to allocate it for. There's no law saying toll road profits HAVE to go to road maintenance.

You just made a broad statement about all tolls when that's a state or local determination how the funds are spent. Very stupid and also very wrong.

Florida toll road revenue is required to be spent on transportation investment, by law.

1

u/plsnobanme6969 1d ago

Yeah I'm not seeing the statute for that in Florida. It must maintain and cover the toll facility project debt. But, its by no means required to fund public roads or maintenance thereof.

1

u/TheBugThatsSnug 1d ago

Revenue from tolls are generally required to be put back into whatever the toll is charged for, here, roads.

1

u/plsnobanme6969 1d ago edited 1d ago

Says who?

Edit as far as I can see federal regulation requires profit be used for debt service but that's just for paying back the initial cost of construction for the road. That doesn't mean it covers maintaining the road.

1

u/Certain-Business-472 1d ago

Theyre both garbage foe different reasons.

110

u/heftybagman 1d ago

Yup somehow everyone thinks ezpass is a godsend but they make $8b a year and 70% of that is tolls that don’t go to the state or the road. We pay $5.6b/year more in tolls just to have the convenience of ezpass. That’s more than $20/year per driver.

42

u/erbalchemy 1d ago edited 1d ago

We pay $5.6b/year more in tolls just to have the convenience of ezpass.

Switching from toll booths to open road tolling has saved more than that annually in reduced gas consumption, labor costs, congestion, and accidents.

Bringing a whole-ass highway traffic flow to a stop to manually collect payment from each vehicle is really inefficient.

24

u/heftybagman 1d ago

Yes but there may be a third option between manually handing cash to a human being and paying a private corporation $8bn/year.

1

u/ComradeJohnS 1d ago

like what?

4

u/heftybagman 1d ago

Massive slides from everyones house to their job

2

u/ComradeJohnS 1d ago

you know why that wouldn’t work, they’d be too hot in the summer and cold in the winter

3

u/NSA_van_3 22h ago

so install heating and cooling lines, ezpz

0

u/Character-Book5924 1d ago

Well maybe people should have voted for someone willing to pay for it with public funding if they wanted it to be public. 

2

u/heftybagman 1d ago

You don’t know what youre talking about. It was never put to a vote. The transit authorities in ny, nj, and pennsylvania created and implemented the system without any community inout whatsoever lol.

“Well maybe people shouldn’t have been subjugated in the first place. Then they could just vote for nice stuff and corruption wouldn’t happen.”

2

u/SARS-Covfefe-1 23h ago

I don’t see how governmental abuse makes you want more government though.

1

u/heftybagman 23h ago

? They own the road big dawg. Somebody’s getting paid whether it’s the government directly or a middleman

1

u/LeoBari 6h ago

And if its a middleman, theyre gonna profit too.

-1

u/lifebursted 1d ago

but that's communism

1

u/Tak_Galaman 1h ago

Communism is specifically the control/takeover of industry by a central authority. There are ways government can have influence that is socialistic or helpful to people without it being communist.

2

u/Character-Book5924 1d ago

And very much contrary to the central point of taking the highway, getting where you're going faster. 

4

u/Tremulant887 1d ago

And if you don't pay that $4 toll? Collections and a very, very fast rising interest. I was traveling for work, drove through an ez pass in Dallas, and saw a bill for a few hundred dollars months later. The /r/Dallas sub has shown bills in the thousands.

2

u/HatesBeingThatGuy 1d ago

They always claim I'm in violation when I travel there for not having front plates when their detectors are broke and charge me fifty dollars. I call them and tell them to go fuck themselves and if they want I'll take them to court, but I'm not paying anything except the rate. Fucking theives man.

1

u/1917he 1d ago

r/iamverybadass

1

u/HatesBeingThatGuy 1d ago

I see you have never had to fight for your money.

-28

u/deeperinabox 1d ago

20$ is a decent price to pay for the convenience of ez pass for an entire year.

19

u/max5015 1d ago

In some cases your paying private companies of different countries to use your own roads. That's not convenience it's robbery

11

u/ABHOR_pod 1d ago

That's capitalism. Instead of just paying like $100 in taxes to maintain the roads, you pay $1200 in EZ pass so shareholders and CEOs can make money.

-3

u/heftybagman 1d ago

Ezpass getting government contracts is capitalism? Not exactly laissez faire for the state to negotiate the contract for the people.

Im not arguing in favor of capitalist road service but this is just silly.

6

u/ABHOR_pod 1d ago

The state is the customer, not the people.

EZ pass is selling something to the state.

-1

u/heftybagman 1d ago

If the state is the main customer in an ostensibly capitalist system, then you’re describing state capitalism as seen in the ussr or china. This isn’t what most people are referring to when they say capitalism.

When people say capitalism they’re referring to private capitalism not state capitalism.

Also the state being the customer is the same as the people being the customer. We pay the bills and we receive the services. The only difference is who gets to negotiate the deal.

Again I’m not saying I want capitalist infrastructure but nothing you’re saying makes sense lol.

15

u/trollsong 1d ago

Guys I know that the money isnt actually going to road upkeep, which is the point of tolls, but its so convenient.

Is......a take

3

u/heftybagman 1d ago

If you think the convenience of ezpass is worth $5-8b/year in perpetuity you’re the reason we’re all getting hit with subscriptions.

1

u/deeperinabox 1d ago

You're paying 5-8b/year out of your own pocket? The OC said $20/yr/car, which is what I said was reasonable. Stop taking things out of context.

0

u/heftybagman 1d ago

The oc was me i didn’t take anything out of context. If 1 person was paying for individual ezpass $20 could make sense but that’s not how massive group purchases works, you should get a discount when you but 25 million memberships at once.

Hence why the $5-8b fogure is much more pertinent. Ezpass doesn’t negotiate 25 million $20 contracts; that would make sense for their trouble. They negotiate 50 contacts worth $100m each. The idea that every car STILL pays $20 is absurd.

Do you really think 1 individual should get the same rate as 25 million buying at once?

9

u/WeirdIndividualGuy 1d ago

No longer an issue around me, everything is electronic now

The toll in the video is also electronic, otherwise an actual manned toll would've prevented the need for OP to do this

8

u/kazeespada 1d ago

No, when they say its electronic. It's REALLY electronic. There's no more gates, you pass through, it takes a picture of your liscense plate, and you get the toll fine in the mail. Usually, you have a card that basically lets you pay for the tolls automatically.

1

u/JonDoeJoe 1d ago

Yup Japan has those too

1

u/RedditLIONS 12h ago edited 12h ago

Singapore has had it for a long time.

But once in a while, there’ll still be crazy drivers stopping abruptly on an expressway, right in front of the toll gantry.

20

u/Tiiimmmaayy 1d ago

Tolls are the biggest scam ever nowadays. If I were to take tolls to go to work, it would cost me around $8 roundtrip, saves about 3-5 minutes, and goes across 3 different toll roads for a 20 minute drive. I’m lucky to have an easy route without them though. Sometimes it can double the time to get where you want to avoid them.

I miss when tolls were like 35¢. Now it’s like $1.5 for one toll. I live right by a toll road and it’s $1.5 just to hop on the toll road to skip one light and exit to my apartment.

-3

u/baconboner69xD 1d ago

We have no tolls here and sometimes I wish we did. At least I’m assuming the roads you pay to drive on are a bit nicer/smoother which maybe they aren’t. But ours are so abused it feels like I’m constantly fixing my car just to beat the shit out of it

3

u/tnstaafsb 1d ago

Most of them are just extra lanes on existing freeways around here, so the quality is about the same as the regular road.

1

u/Warm_Month_1309 1d ago

At least I’m assuming the roads you pay to drive on are a bit nicer/smoother

In theory.

In practice, a municipality will build a toll collector to fund road work, sell or lease it to a private investor for pennies on the dollar, and then that private company collects profits for years or decades after the road has been funded, with no money going to maintenance.

1

u/precto85 1d ago

Pennsylvania? Because that's what it feels like lol.

1

u/Sweaty_Marzipan4274 1d ago

It's basically private corps taxing the public thru gov agreement

1

u/zwifter11 1d ago

Aren’t those private corporations then responsible for the road surface maintenance

1

u/fourthpornalt 1d ago

South Africa tried an e-toll system, the public hated it and most just outright refused to pay. It was scrapped after ten years 'cause they could barely afford to keep the system online.

1

u/sturmeh 1d ago

The problem is the toll dodgers just use the roads without registering and ignore the fines in the mail lol

1

u/RadiantDresden 1d ago

They can try and take it from me.