Golden Gate Bridge To Eliminate Tollbooths 349
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The San Francisco Chronicle reports that tollbooths and toll collectors, a fixture at the Golden Gate Bridge since it opened in 1937, will be eliminated starting in 2012 as the bridge moves to an all-electronic system, cutting 34 jobs and saving $19.2 million over the first eight years. The bridge will move to a toll collection strategy that combines the existing FasTrak system with one that photographs the license plates of cars going through the toll plaza and mails a bill to the registered owners. Other structures and bridges have successfully gone to all-electronic tolls, including the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia and the Leeville Bridge in Louisiana, but not everyone is happy with the change. 'This is a world-famous bridge, and you need a human face,' says Philip Hynes. 'You need people in those toll booths to greet people.'"
Electronic tolls way faster (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd much rather cruise through tolls without having to stop, and I really have no desire to see these human toll booth operators.
Clean air anyone? Traffic jams? (Score:5, Interesting)
Further, what these idiots fail to realize is that all those cars idling at and then accelerating away from the tollbooths add up to a huge emissions source - something which California says they're always concerned about.
In the last decade they added "Open-road tolling" on the tollways around Chicago - the air quality was measurably improved in the areas near the toll-collection sites.
The bridges in the bay area are also major commuter routes - eliminating the requirement for every car to stop at a toll booth can only improve traffic flow.
For everyone who loves the toll collectors, I bet there are hundreds who hate them. I remember a story in one of the Chicago papers about all the bad things people would do to the toll collectors - like heating up coins using the car's cigarette lighter before giving them to the collector. The exhaust gasses those folks have to breathe all day can't be good for them either.
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Why? What have they done. Or is it because they are the minions of the people who put the rules in place? In that case, is it OK to hate the military people for doing the same?
Because then I am confused, because I admire what they do but hat why they do it.
I don't drive (or live in the USA), but I would assume its less what they've done and more the simple fact that they are the person who is there preventing them from getting to work/home/other faster because they have to stop and wait. It is the toll collector who is slowing down their journey (or it may be perceived that way). I wont try to think of an example of a soldier's action that you would dislike them for doing for risk of hyperbole.
TL;DR: I doubt its personal, its just they're the one who is the
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In a lot of places it is also a highly unionized job. They can't be fired and often can't be bothered to do their job. It makes a slow process of driving through a toll booth even more painful when you have to wait for someone to get off their phone call to bother with your fare.
I am pretty sure it's unionized here too (at least in the NYC Metro Area where I live). But, ironically, some of the nicest and friendliest people I have met have been toll collectors. Whether it's because I needed quick directions, or they simply took the time to smile, say hi and wish me a good morning, that has generally been my experience. Combine that with the fact that we are talking the NYC area, where being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every New Yorker's God given right, and thei
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Why? What have they done. Or is it because they are the minions of the people who put the rules in place? In that case, is it OK to hate the military people for doing the same?
Because then I am confused, because I admire what they do but hat why they do it.
First, when since does anyone need a rational reason to hate someone else? I am not saying that's right - but it is sadly the way this reality of human existence works. That aside, (and to the irrational), there are people who take out their frustration on those they idiotically think are responsible for such. So, waiting on line for minutes to pay a toll, and the toll collector becomes the target of the person's ire - kinda like shooting the messenger. It does not make sense, but it does happen.
One should
Re:Clean air anyone? Traffic jams? (Score:5, Funny)
What's wrong with hatting the military?
Nothing really. A bit redundant in all, they already have hats. But if you insist....
Re:Clean air anyone? Traffic jams? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut.
Not everyone wants to.
There is nothing soul crushing about doing the job to which are best suited.
We are currently overcompensating some segments of our society because the wealthy have (temporarily) built a ring around certain jobs and then are passing them on to their children. It won't hold. There just is no value to paying a CEO 100 million dollars when the similar CEO in china or india is doing just as good a job for 1 million dollars a year.
Overcompensating them makes people envy them even tho they would be unhappy in those jobs.
There are lots of people of low to average IQ who are happy with a relatively mindless job surrounded by pleasant work buddies.
But you are right- those jobs can be automated. (and are being automated). The end result will not be that those people suddenly become smarter, talented, and capable of doing jobs that require high intelligence or talent.
So what happens to them when their jobs are automated away and there are no other jobs to go to?
They can vote or swing a club or shoot a gun perfectly well. They'll get unhappy when they have nothing to do- no money to spend- and folks act like it's their fault.
FastTrac (Score:5, Insightful)
Tracking your every move, inside our coast-to-coast prison.
Your papers, please!
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What if you're a visitor with an out of state car, or a rental car?
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"You need a human face" (Score:5, Insightful)
No you don't.
You need to eliminate the 5-minute backup at the toll booth, and thereby save yourself ~2000 hours over a lifetime. You don't need the human face, just as you don't need an operator asking, "Number please?" on the telephone.
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No you don't.
You need to eliminate the 5-minute backup at the toll booth, and thereby save yourself ~2000 hours over a lifetime. You don't need the human face, just as you don't need an operator asking, "Number please?" on the telephone.
+1 insightful.
I too hate waiting in toll booth lineups.
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Have to agree.
Though it's going to be very, very interesting the first time some guy gets a bill and the photo shows that it was either (a) a stolen car or (b) some asshole from a valet service taking a joyride.
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No you don't.
You need to eliminate the 5-minute backup at the toll booth, and thereby save yourself ~2000 hours over a lifetime. You don't need the human face, just as you don't need an operator asking, "Number please?" on the telephone.
I always call the operator for that personal touch.
Number please?
Operator, please connect me to Bensonhurst 0-7741.
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Yeah, except this does nothing to change to hinder privacy, as the cameras have already been in place for some time. I remember that story of the guy from Wired that tried to "disappear" and there was a photo of his car for at a toll booth.
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Wow, you started off with a great point about privacy (which I agree with), then devolved into a rant about how users of bridges, roads, etc. shouldn't have to pay for use and then into something silly about corporations.
What the OP said was that tolls are generally evil. And that is true. Whether you have toll collectors or transponder equipment, you end up wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on a revenue collection method that is strictly inferior to the alternative: Raising the gas tax.
We already have a gas tax, so the cost of increasing it to offset the revenue lost by eliminating tolls would have zero government overhead. Meanwhile you eliminate the cost of transponders, readers, collection and enforcement costs again
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What the hell are you talking about? Number please? Please. The operator asks you for a business, person, location, and then GIVES you a number. That's not as trivial a task to automate as you think.
Wow I hate douches like you that lie and twist reality to make points.
Whoosh?
I believe the OP was referring to the jobs that were eliminated back when phone companies went from human operators connecting calls on a switchboard (where you had to give them the number) to electronic switchboards that enabled actually dialing a number (though they still required human operators for many years after that to connect long distance calls).
If you think about it, for both telephone switchboards 50 years ago, and toll booths today, we are:
- eliminating menial jobs with human interaction
Works great in Dallas (Score:3)
Personally I love the tollway system here in Dallas (not that I use it much, public highways are FREE so to speak). Drive on, drive off, you get a bill at the end of the month with a summary of the charges. For someone who doesn't regularly use cash, it makes my life just a little bit easier. The other alternative is keeping a transponder in your car... not really my cup of tea.
But yeah, long story short we've had the system in effect on portions of Hwy 121 now for about 6 years and it's just recently gone live on the main "Dallas Tollway" with zero issues.
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These systems are nothing but trouble if you find yourself on a road without booths and you are in a rental car. You either pay a high daily rate plus usage, to get a car with a transponder, or you really get zapped if they forward a bill a month later
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Yeah but it works out great if you don't rent a car and drive an out-of-state vehicle... they don't bill out-of-state plates at all!
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Saving $19.2M over the first eight years...how? (Score:3)
The toll-collectors get paid $70K per year?
Re:Saving $19.2M over the first eight years...how? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, $19.2 million, divided by 8 years, divided by 34 people equals...
The toll-collectors get paid $70K per year?
That cost probably includes their medical insurance, the employer's portion of SS and other taxes, vacation time, etc.
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The employer usually kicks in for half of the employee's Social Security payments (7.some percent of the income, I think?), and pay for some, most, or all of the health/dental/vision insurance premium payments, which can vary. There are employers (quite a few, actually) who pay no insurance, but it is often done as a benefit to attract talent, so most usually pay for at least some of it. Employers will often also pay a percentage towards an employee's 401k (personal retirement fund) up to a set percentage (
Re:Saving $19.2M over the first eight years...how? (Score:5, Informative)
Salaries aren't the only cost. Don't forget health insurance and pension plan. Plus the cost of maintaining the actual booths. Plus the armored trucks that have to carry a few tons of quarters every day.
Re:Saving $19.2M over the first eight years...how? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Saving $19.2M over the first eight years...how? (Score:4, Informative)
If you get paid $50k a year your employer is paying close to $70k to keep you as an employee.
or do you think that health insurance, workers comp, 401k, etc are all magically free?
When will they and the other us systems go ezpass? (Score:5, Interesting)
When will they and all the other us systems link up with ez-pass?
Isn't that public infrastructure? (Score:2)
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Try driving to/from NYC - the bridge tolls are ridiculous. There's at least one route without a toll, but all the most commonly-used bridges have tolls as high as $8 (one way). Gold Gate Bridge is similar, not sure what the price on that one is right now though.
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Try driving to/from NYC - the bridge tolls are ridiculous. There's at least one route without a toll, but all the most commonly-used bridges have tolls as high as $8 (one way). Gold Gate Bridge is similar, not sure what the price on that one is right now though.
The Golden Gate is $6 right now, $5 if you pay with FasTrak. The Bay Bridge is $6 during rush hour, $5 on the weekends, and $4 on off-peak. All the other bridges in the Bay Area are $5. Cars with those douchey "Clean Air Vehicle" decals are $2.50 everywhere.
Anyway, my point is it costs me $100 to get to work every month, and some people even have to cross TWO bridges to get to San Francisco in less than 2 hours.
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Here in Dallas they're just money machines. Politicians see the need for new roads (especially in fast-growing Texas) and use state funds to pay for the highways, and then lease the toll-road rights (a 99 year lease!!) to private companies for a lump sum, which they can then use for other purposes. The NTTA toll company has been so successful with this State-Backed venture that they were lobbying for a multi-billion dollar 10 lane highway between Dallas and Mexico through west Texas under the same agreement
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It was commonplace for tolls to be required to pay for the bridge/road system under the guise that the tolls would be removed after the bonds were paid. Unfortunately, as with any tax, the government never has any intention of making them temporary and does whatever it can to justify the influx of dollars they have done nothing to prepare for a time without.
I avoid toll roads, like the god awful ones in Chicago, like the plague. In fact when I drive from Minnesota to any states east of here, I drive down to
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Eliminate tolls (Score:2, Interesting)
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Mod up. That bridge was paid for decades ago. Upkeep is in tye budget for all roads and bridges in the state. The only reason (and a poor one) to keep tolls is to have jobs for people. Eliminate the jobs, then continuing tolls on such projects is fleecing the locals. I call this municiple greed.
Maintaining a suspension bridge the size of the Golden Gate with exposure to sea breeze is extremely expensive. Take a look at NYC's free East River bridges vs. the toll ones. Deferred maintenance is not a pretty sight and California is also pretty much broke.
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There is really no reason to have all the additional expense of toll roads.
The toll road or bridge can be privately financed, constructed and maintained.
The "bridge to nowhere" does not get built because private capital won't fund it.
[That always means you might not get the transcontinental railroad or the Alaskan highway. That you are flying Pan-Am's Clippers or Count Zeppelin's s airships because no one can afford the price of a mile-long concrete runway.]
The entrepreneur can experiment - and probably go broke - developing techniques that are not likely to be government funded
Just get rid of tolls completely. (Score:5, Interesting)
Tolls waste a lot of time and money in an attempt to spread the cost of the road to the people that 'use' it, but this doesn't work. Everyone benefits from the road system. Even if you don't own a car, the goods and services you use rely on them. Adding tolls just increases the cost of those goods and services, so the entire toll industry is a waste of time. Just tax people evenly for the roads we all rely on and skip the wasteful toll booths and electronics.
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You misunderstand the reason for toll booths on the golden gate bridge. It's about reducing demand.
By having a toll on the bridge, a certain percentage of the population is going to decide that it's not worth it to cross the bridge, and will plan their trip using an alternate route. This reduces the number of cars crossing and reduces congestion. By implementing a toll, you help insure that there is at least one non-congested (or relatively quick) path by car into the city, so that those who need to get the
Re:Just get rid of tolls completely. (Score:5, Informative)
You misunderstand the reason for toll booths on the golden gate bridge. It's about reducing demand.
By having a toll on the bridge, a certain percentage of the population is going to decide that it's not worth it to cross the bridge, and will plan their trip using an alternate route. This reduces the number of cars crossing and reduces congestion. By implementing a toll, you help insure that there is at least one non-congested (or relatively quick) path by car into the city, so that those who need to get there in a hurry can. If you need to get into the city 15 to 20 minutes faster, the toll is worth it.
With the toll, the bridge is useful to some people (or all people some of the time). Without the toll, the bridge becomes just as congested as any other road, because people choosing between the bridge and the alternative will favor the bridge until congestion makes them indifferent between the two.
You misunderstand the reason for toll booths on the Golden Gate Bridge. It's about revenue.
There ARE no alternate toll-free paths into San Francisco unless you want to add nearly three hours to your drive. They also strategically planned the toll booths so that most people cannot avoid paying a toll by picking and choosing different paths to take and running the toll-free side of a bridge in the morning and the toll-free side of another bridge on their way home. You must not be from the Bay Area, so I'll forgive you, but there simply is no feasible way to bypass the Golden Gate Bridge to get into the city.
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Well, you can take a bus, or a ferry. So there are two reasons. Revenue, and the fact that San Francisco totally hates cars.
(Some of it is justified concern about overloading the place with traffic, but some of it is definitely philosophical. If they had a choice between making things easier for traffic and a punch in the face, I'd expect the government to take the punch in the face every time.)
You have a solid point, and I would absolutely love to take public transportation to work. Unfortunately, even with as much environment-friendly bullshit as we spew around here, the public transportation SUCKS, and people refuse to make it better. Our bus networks have no money to improve the way they work because people don't use them because they're horrible. I would have to get on a bus at 4:21AM to get to work at 6:11 -- 50 minutes early. Twice have the citizens of Marin County struck down legislation t
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There are several bridges in the Bay Area - Dumbarton bridge (84), San Mateo bridge(92). Whenever one of these bridges was blocked by a road accident, or for road maintenance, traffic would just route to any one of the other bridges. One day, they raised tolls for one of the bridges, and traffic patterns completed changed as commuters just routed round to the cheaper ones. Next day, the other bridges had put up their prices and traffic patterns returned to normal.
If anything, commuters will favor the bridge
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Currently, 50 percent of bus and ferry operations are funded by Bridge tolls,...
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yay, roads for the rich!
Re:Just get rid of tolls completely. (Score:5, Insightful)
And extending the same idea, everyone benefits from the existence of the Internet, therefore people who don't have access to it should also pay a share of your ISP bill, right? Not everyone benefits from the road system equally. People who drive more benefit more personally and also cause more damage to the roads and they should pay more for the maintenance. The gas tax that we have now is one way to do it but its imperfect. The most fair way to finance roads is to pay by the mile traveled with the weight of the vehicle factored in, which is pretty much what the tolls do. The only problem with tolls is the practicality, the delays they cause etc but it seems like technology can fix that.
Re:Just get rid of tolls completely. (Score:5, Insightful)
And extending the same idea, everyone benefits from the existence of the Internet, therefore people who don't have access to it should also pay a share of your ISP bill, right?
No, but everyone should pay to get internet (and road) access to everyone. If we can count on everyone having internet access we can scrap older less efficient ways to do things. This benefits everyone.
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You Dont Understand Politics & The Human Condi (Score:2, Insightful)
No what would happen if your suggestion was honestly considered by politicians is this. They would eliminate toll roads, and add a new tax on all of the citizen incomes to cover the roads than they are now. However, with even more money available than before, the roads would be maintained even less than they are now for some odd reason. And, over time the money would get mismanaged and re-appropriated to their own private projects, completely unrelated to the road system, and funnel that money to their best
Re:Just get rid of tolls completely. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whilst reading TFA (I know, it's embarrassing, but I still do it) I noted the bridge "operates with a $89M deficit" ... um, how the hell does it manage THAT? The bridge itself must be long since paid for, and maintenance can't be all THAT high -- surely they don't do a total resurfacing every year? So how much of the deficit is a direct cost of running the toll system itself? Or is it just more of the vaunted California gov't economy's ability to spend at a rate 3x its means?
Also:
"A toll-taker's base pay starts at $48,672 a year and tops out at $54,080."
Holy shit, where do WE sign up to make that kind of money for sitting in a booth?? (Yeah, I know that's barely getting by in San Francisco, but still...) Plus benefits and retirement, no doubt.
BTW, we already do get taxed evenly, based on usage -- that's what the gasoline tax does. You're taxed in direct proportion to miles driven and weight on the road surface (which translates into wear and tear) because that's the reality of a given driving distance and a given vehicle's weight-to-MPG ratio. Yeah, it gets harsh if you're forced to commute long distances, but I've yet to see a fairer system.
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Quite the opposite. After a certain point roads start being congested because, while it takes time in traffic to move, the road is "free" and so people use it. There's been a growing voice in Toronto, Canada saying that tolls should be introduced: we have some of the worst traffic jams (worse than LA), and stretches of Highway 401 get over 500,000 cars an hour (the busiest in the world).
How about the situation where people use free roads to avoid expensive tolls, resulting in more congestion on the free roads, while the toll road remains underused? One might expect the toll to be lowered to balance this out, but it seems the tolls only go higher.
Wait a minute (Score:2)
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They wouldn't make eye contact if you rolled through the booth in an Abrams tank....
Shit, I wouldn't either. Who would want to risk looking at a crazy person in a tank the wrong way?
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actually, most of the golden gate booth attendants are pretty friendly, for the 5 or so seconds it takes for them to give you change.
Toll Attendant Anecdote (Score:2)
I've driven from NY to CA and back a few times. The last time, driving to NY, I did it in 2.5 days. I wasn't driving while tired - I always took breaks at the first sign of drowsiness - but as you can imagine I wasn't in the friendliest and peppiest state. In Indiana, I waited in a large line for the cash toll booths - it was something like a 50 cent toll - how hard can it be?
I get up to the booth, and the middle-aged lady notices my California license plate and starts chatting me up. "Oh, you're from Calif
Switzerland has a nice system (Score:5, Informative)
You buy a sticker to put on the inside of your windshield. It costs ~32€ and is good for a year. With that, you can drive anywhere, without any further tolls. Switzerland has butt-loads of tunnels and bridges that they have to maintain, and their autobahns are some of the best I have ever driven on. They are probably cleaner than most surgical operating room in the world.
In Italy, they have some kind of electronic subscription sticker system that lets you get through the toll booths fast. Or you can just shove in your EC bank card or credit card at unmanned booths. They do have folks at a few toll booths. On my last trip there, I saw that a lot of tourists would hold up maps, and ask the toll collector for advice. So maybe tossing the human element out is not such a great idea.
In Germany there are no tolls, and on a lot of the autobahns, no speed limit. Their autobahn motto is: "Drive fast, die young, leave a beautiful, mangled corpse."
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Purely technical question: what do you do with the expired sticker?
A sticker that goes on the license plate can be replaced with a new sticker; you just put the new one on top. But a sticker that goes on the inside of a windshield won't be seen.
I suppose you have to scrape the old one off. Do they make that easy? The ones my garage uses to remind me of my next oil change just peel off, though I suspect they may want ones you have to destroy to remove (to prevent theft).
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The ones my garage uses to remind me of my next oil change just peel off, though I suspect they may want ones you have to destroy to remove (to prevent theft).
It's easy to peel of, but "self-destructs" in the process, so you can't peel it off, and put it in another car. Of course, the folks at Wired and Make probably know a process to do this. Most likely involving some nasty chemical solvents.
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I still have the sticker, b/c its a pain to take it off where they put it
I bought the sticker before I drove through Switzerland, which I would recommend to anyone planning on driving to or through Switzerland. There was a diagram on the sticker of three places that it could be placed on the windshield. So I chose a convenient place to put paste it, and that was that. It peals of easily, but self destructs in the process, so that you cannot "loan" the sticker to friends. Of course, with enough work, you might be able to do it, but is it really worth 32€? That's chump ch
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The autobahn is the safest road in Germany in terms of person-km. The mandatory driving school includes x hours of supervised autobahn or similar driving.
Re:Switzerland has a nice system (Score:4, Interesting)
I wish I had mod points to mod you up.
They also pay special attention to tailgating. I have heard stories about automatic tracking of car-car distance on bridges in Germany.
Tailgating and lame-ass changing lanes is the main reason for accidents, not the absence of the speed limit.
Instead of putting emphasis on driver education (stricter driving tests, for example) they toll the economy with their stupid speed limits, increasing amount of time people spend in traffic unproportionally to the speed limit reduction. /rant
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And what do you do if the bill isn't paid? Suspend the registration? Cali can't do that to out of state plates
Using similar reasoning have you ever tried ignoring a traffic ticket that you got out of state? You will discover that your own state will revoke your license.
45 of the 50 states belong to the Non-Resident Violator Compact [wikipedia.org]. So, while California can't yank your license, they can report you to your own state who will. Check out the very creepy & insidious v2.0 of the NRVC: the Driver License Agreement [wikipedia.org]. Ugh... if it is fully ratified, then the "or Canada/Mexico" part of your point could also become an
What bullshit (Score:2)
No, I don't need a human face or to be greeted by somebody who's been sitting in a cramped booth and mechanically greeting people for months. Ew.
It's a frickin' bridge, not a hotel.
Dallas Texas toll system - awesome (Score:3)
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New bridges, new tech (Score:2)
The newest bridge here in Vancouver, the Golden Ears Bridge [translink.ca], uses electronic tolling. It's the first toll bridge in these parts since tolls were abolished on other bridges in the 1960s. I don't use it enough to justify a transponder. Translink send me a bill for a few dollars every 3 months. Since it goes from nowhere to nowhere, nobody uses it much at all: it's almost always deserted. It's a handy landmark for the Pitt Meadows Airport [pittmeadowsairport.com], though the actual reporting point when approaching from the east is Ham
Visitors (Score:2)
That's all good as long as they make it visitor friendly. I hate being relegated to the non-FasTrack ghetto while passing through Orange County California.
I think the situation is different with a national landmark unless they want a bunch of rental car companies getting bills in the mail everyday.
Overall I dislike FasTrack and the ability of a private company to give out traffic fines.
Unhelpful Knuckledragger != Human Face (Score:3)
'This is a world-famous bridge, and you need a human face,' says Philip Hynes.
My personal experience was:
No signs warning it was a toll. When we got right up to it, we saw there was a toll and it was cash only. We didn't have any cash so looked for somewhere to turn around. There wasn't anywhere. We pulled up to the booth and explained the situation, the knuckledragger didn't actually say a word to us. He just noted our license plate and waved us on.
OK, we figured. That's not too unpleasant a system. They'll send us a bill for the couple of dollars in the mail, maybe a website we can go to pay it on.
No. We got a $30 fine for running the toll. The toll we stopped at, explained we didn't have cash but were happy to pay any other way or would turn around if that wasn't OK.
Not only that but the fine notice allows you to not pay for a first offense IF you sign up for their automatic payment system... a system that deducts the first month to cover that alleged infraction and insists on pre-billing you, keeping more than the cost of the fine for future payments.
So, after we talked to the knuckledragger, thought we were just being offered an alternate way to pay, got waved on by him, then FINED for toll evasion? I, for one, will be dancing to the thought of his lost job. I'm sure he's well qualified for a role with the TSA so he won't be unemployed for long.
Yes, without a human there, there'll be no way to explain situations like that to an unfeeling machine. But when the humans were worthless examples of the species to begin with, monosylabic and leading you in to fines when you thought you'd simply asked for help? Precisely nothing will be lost.
Bitter? Me? ;)
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so how does that work?
Or a brand new car without plates yet?
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You can legally drive on the road without plates?.......
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Yes, you just have a small (temporary) tag in the windshield until your plates come in.
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Oh... you get bright orange stickers the size of a license plate here that are to be placed where the license plate would be.
Like this:
http://media.photobucket.com/image/pr%2525C3%2525B8veskilt/AtleNorsteb/Diverse/21052009350.jpg [photobucket.com]
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You can legally drive on the road without plates?.......
I know a lot of states give you temporary license plates bearing your number, but California just makes you keep your registration application folded up and taped inside the windshield and that is valid for 60 days I believe so you have time for your permanent plates to arrive.
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With a temporary tag in the rear window you can.
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Depends what state/province you live in. Some let you have a printed licence taped to your window. Where I live you *must* be plated and you have to order your plate when you buy your car and have it installed at the dealer. Or if its a private sale you have to bring your plate you want to use with you.
Re:rental car? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, it's tremendous fun to go through an automated toll with a rental car. First the toll authority sends a bill for $1 to the rental company. Then the rental company charges your card (that's still in their system) for $15 based on the fine print in the rental agreement. A run through a lengthy toll road with five or six toll monitors results in individual bills for each one and can get you a bill from the rental company for a hundred or more.
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Oh, it's tremendous fun to go through an automated toll with a rental car. First the toll authority sends a bill for $1 to the rental company. Then the rental company charges your card (that's still in their system) for $15 based on the fine print in the rental agreement. A run through a lengthy toll road with five or six toll monitors results in individual bills for each one and can get you a bill from the rental company for a hundred or more.
Which is why I just looked into buying stock in the various rental companies that have large presences in California.
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The EZPass/FastLane system is a little more friendly. The rental car has an RFID transponder inside a metal box, which can be opened by the driver before a toll. They simply add the tolls to your bill, plus a daily charge for each day the transponder was used. The box lets you bring your own transponder and avoid the daily fee (by holding up your own and leaving the box closed).
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They're going to *mail* bills?
Works pretty well here (Vancouver, Canada). You get a bill, you go online, enter your license plate and CC # and pay the bill. Of course the toll is $4, so it makes more sense to mail out a bill.
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They're going to *mail* bills? Seriously? So, those that haven't got a FasTrac basically get across the bridge for free... A lot of the time anyway.
No, because if you don't pay your bill you will have bigger problems than the $6 charge to get across the bridge. Also, FasTrak is still $1 cheaper on the GGB, so there's some incentive there to get it.
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They're going to *mail* bills? Seriously? So, those that haven't got a FasTrac basically get across the bridge for free... A lot of the time anyway.
If by "for free" you mean "your right to drive is suspended until you pay these tolls plus late fees, service charges, etc" then yes, they get to go across the bridge for free. At least that is how it works in this state - even for one toll you're mail-billed for and forget to pay on time.
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Tourists vs residents (Score:5, Interesting)
Take a look at Locans and Tourists #3: San Francisco [flickr.com], a map of geotagged photos of San Francisco based on a 'tourist' vs 'resident' heuristic (tourists take photos all at once; residents take them over a period of months). San Francisco is a divided city.
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What I'd probably care about are the high rental car toll charges that other people have been mentioning.
So that person saying tourists would need toll booth people to greet them is silly. Toll/Ticket booths etc are just stuff tourists put up with in order to see the actual tourist attraction, whether it may be the Golden Gate Bridge, the Grand Canyon, the Pyramids.
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As someone who lived in SF for four years, believe me when I say they soak the residents, too.
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So what happens when someone decides to borrow other peoples plates?
You end up with tractors and combine harvesters being issued for speeding violations in downtown during rush hour.
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they'll bring up the Homeland Security angle of having human eyes at toll booths to catch bad actors.
"Booth 23 to headquarters... Booth 23 to headquarters... The operator of the black Lincoln Navigator at this booth has been positively identified as Keanu Reeves. Awaiting further instructions."