So it's $5.00 a month to drive in Denver?

Can you get someone to sponsor your driving if you're particularly good at it?

UltraElite?

When Chicago made the huge push towards 'open road tolling' they doubled the fees if you paid in cash to get everyone to move to having an iPass.

Couldn't they make better use of the extra lanes...? Maybe, I don't know, open it up to regular traffic....?

Chargers are going to whoop it up on the Broncos.

Print it. Done.

/end troll-jack

Tolls are farkin' stupid.

The rising toll comes because of an agreement between the Colorado Department of Transportation and the Denver mass transit system that highway tolls cannot be lower than express service rates on buses.

Should be a simple matter for the legislature to void that agreement and revoke the employment of any government employees who approved it.

ZAZ: The rising toll comes because of an agreement between the Colorado Department of Transportation and the Denver mass transit system that highway tolls cannot be lower than express service rates on buses.

Should be a simple matter for the legislature to void that agreement and revoke the employment of any government employees who approved it.

Why? It seems pretty straightforward and logical to me. If you want to encourage people to use public transport you have to make it cheaper than the alternative.

Perhaps you disagree with their aims but you can't argue that they are using the wrong means to get there.

Um, yeah, that's great for you poor schmucks who can only spring for the $3.50 express tolls.

Actual VIPs like me use the secret UltraTo
--- CONNECTION LOST ---
--- NO CARRIER ---

ZAZ: The rising toll comes because of an agreement between the Colorado Department of Transportation and the Denver mass transit system that highway tolls cannot be lower than express service rates on buses.

Should be a simple matter for the legislature to void that agreement and revoke the employment of any government employees who approved it.

It does seem there's a number of better options, but I doubt Colorado wants to work on something sane and reasonable. Governments rarely do.

DoomDoomDoom: TRolls are farkin' stupid.

FTFY

darkscout: When Chicago made the huge push towards 'open road tolling' they doubled the fees if you paid in cash to get everyone to move to having an iPass.

I don't know the specifics of what you're describing, but it doesn't sound unique. Its probably the same idea behind why a ride on the tube in London costs 4 pounds without a card and only 1.5 with.

Raising tolls to create a balance with buses doesn't seem awfully unfair to me. Really though, shouldn't the bus trip be cheaper?

Express and HOV lanes piss me off. Instead of taking up three lanes worth of road to have the Jersey barriers to block the lanes off why not put three farking extra lanes for everyone?

ZAZ: The rising toll comes because of an agreement between the Colorado Department of Transportation and the Denver mass transit system that highway tolls cannot be lower than express service rates on buses.

Should be a simple matter for the legislature to void that agreement and revoke the employment of any government employees who approved it.

Because enforcing policy by statute is reasonable? Making mass transit more attractive than SOV commutes is a benefit for everyone, and raising funds for highways without increasing general taxes is also a benefit. Pretty sure it's not an individual government employee who pulled that out of a single ass.

davidphogan:
It does seem there's a number of better options, but I doubt Colorado wants to work on something sane and reasonable that benefits only the most wasteful and selfish. Governments rarely do.

ftfe

Haw Haw Total*Farkers are suckers!

eddyatwork: Express and HOV lanes piss me off. Instead of taking up three lanes worth of road to have the Jersey barriers to block the lanes off why not put three farking extra lanes for everyone?

Or quit eating up surface area with ever-larger highways and improve mass transit so it's more desirable and useable. We've been cutting routes and service for 10 years and then wondering why our ridership keeps decreasing.

Did they squash the plan to build the new Charger's stadium in Chula Vista off of the 125 Expressway? There mentioned a toll road and the Chargers... Does that count as being back on subject?

st.theresa: improve mass transit so it's more desirable and useable.

We spent a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq. Imagine if we had taken that money and invested in high speed rail between our major cities. I'd love to see that.

Seth'n'Spectrum: darkscout: When Chicago made the huge push towards 'open road tolling' they doubled the fees if you paid in cash to get everyone to move to having an iPass.

I don't know the specifics of what you're describing, but it doesn't sound unique. Its probably the same idea behind why a ride on the tube in London costs 4 pounds without a card and only 1.5 with.

Raising tolls to create a balance with buses doesn't seem awfully unfair to me. Really though, shouldn't the bus trip be cheaper?

If you think about it too, the places that are implementing that practice are tourist centers. (ie Chicago) Locals that use that transportation network regularly get the fast pass. Tourists unaware of the savings from a fast pass, or lack of needed one because their tourists, pay the extra amount. If enough of them come through per year, you make a hefty profit off someone other than the locals.

This article could just as easily be about Austin's toll roads..

//taxpayers paid for it once, and they're paying again.

eddyatwork: st.theresa: improve mass transit so it's more desirable and useable.

We spent a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq. Imagine if we had taken that money and invested in high speed rail between our major cities. I'd love to see that.

Shoulda, coulda, woulda......Uncle Sam says blowing sh-t up is way more fun than your train.

You gotta pay the troll toll if you want that boy's hole.

/I feel so much lighter, freer, and more merry now that I have the burden of TotalFark eliteness of my back. I'm sure glad I haven't been sponsored in a while.
//*fingers crossed*C'MON REVERSE PSYCHOLOGY!

st.theresa: eddyatwork: Express and HOV lanes piss me off. Instead of taking up three lanes worth of road to have the Jersey barriers to block the lanes off why not put three farking extra lanes for everyone?

Or quit eating up surface area with ever-larger highways and improve mass transit so it's more desirable and useable. We've been cutting routes and service for 10 years and then wondering why our ridership keeps decreasing.

Since you know better about driving than me and want to make those decisions for me, can you also come over and clean my apartment? Be a good nanny, I want behind the toilet cleaned right this time.

jake_lex: Can you get someone to sponsor your driving if you're particularly good at it?

If I were particularly good at farking, or if I chose to pay the $5 to join the elite toll lanes of Fark, I could give you a +1.

eddyatwork: Express and HOV lanes piss me off. Instead of taking up three lanes worth of road to have the Jersey barriers to block the lanes off why not put three farking extra lanes for everyone?

Population control = best traffic solution.

We don't need more lanes, we need less people.

Constance Velocity: Population control = best traffic solution.

UH OH! The breeders are going to be pissed at you!

davidphogan:
Since you know better about driving than me and want to make those decisions for me, can you also come over and clean my apartment? Be a good nanny, I want behind the toilet cleaned right this time.

You're encouraged to go live on a deserted island and see how well that works for you. Those of us who live in high-density urban centers expect basic services, including transit for high-volume commuters and low-pay employees, just like fire and police and schools. Satellite suburbs that choose to not provide transit in general end up with patchy intra-urban service to bring low-income workers to the minimum wage jobs and high-income commuters back to the downtown financial center.

And the only way I'll help you with your toilet is after I find my thigh high boots and a whip, peebreath. Assume the position.

Toll roads piss me the fark off.

SFDnozzlehead: If you think about it too, the places that are implementing that practice are tourist centers. (ie Chicago) Locals that use that transportation network regularly get the fast pass. Tourists unaware of the savings from a fast pass, or lack of needed one because their tourists, pay the extra amount. If enough of them come through per year, you make a hefty profit off someone other than the locals.

While I'm not denying that taking advantage of tourists is a profitable industry, most of the NE states have interoperable toll passes. A NY pass works everywhere between MA and IL.

/Except Ohio who haven't mastered such fancy technology of the future yet
//Ohio sucks

Roads should cost what they cost, $1 or $3.50 or $10. If buses can run cheaper, good for them. If not, why should drivers be punished for choosing a more cost-effective mode?

eddyatwork: We spent a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq. Imagine if we had taken that money and invested in high speed rail between our major cities. I'd love to see that.

Agreed. Local mass transit to me is nothing but political busywork in many cases. (In Grand Forks, its generally faster to walk than take the bus unless your lucky.) It's hard to install local mass transit in an area that didn't evolve with it and it inevitably becomes embroiled with politics. I think it would be better to work on long distance high-speed passenger rail.

ZAZ: Roads should cost what they cost, $1 or $3.50 or $10. If buses can run cheaper, good for them. If not, why should drivers be punished for choosing a more cost-effective mode?

Because the explicit cost per mile of paving doesn't equal the real overall cost of driving SOVs or eating up natural resources or ruining neighborhoods or any of the other additional costs of driving. In Europe, many countries add these costs to gas prices, so they often pay twice what Americans pay == and we've seen how well Americans enjoy paying that much. There's also the fact that low-income employees traditionally get subsidies in the form of lower use cost of mass transit to allow employers to not have to absorb the costs of hiring these workers, either by paying for transit or by paying substantially higher hourly pay == and passing these over to customers. And our population also has a substantial qty of people who have their licenses suspended, or who are ineligible for licenses, and we as a society generally consider them worthy of transit as well.
In general, communities realize that mass transit must be lower cost-to-user than toll roads.

Britney Spear's Speculum: Toll roads piss me the fark off.

You'll get over it.

Crosshair:
Agreed. Local mass transit to me is nothing but political busywork in many cases. (In Grand Forks, its generally faster to walk than take the bus unless your lucky.) It's hard to install local mass transit in an area that didn't evolve with it and it inevitably becomes embroiled with politics. I think it would be better to work on long distance high-speed passenger rail.

Then how do people get to work? transit within a city is integrally important to commuting convenience and allocating employment resources across the urban area. Expecting everyone to just use a single-occupancy-vehicle and drive whatever low-mileage vehicle they want WHILE having subsidized gas costs is irresponsible and ludicrous.

Small towns don't have the same problem as larger urban areas, but even in small towns, recent development tends to be the expansive, low density "suburb" type layout and being able to walk anywhere is no longer a possibility in many towns. Unless cities are willing to implement restrictive development requirements, mass transit will become more and more important even in smaller towns. As it is, mass transit is requisite in mid- and larger towns, and funding is being cut annually.

eddyatwork: Express and HOV lanes piss me off. Instead of taking up three lanes worth of road to have the Jersey barriers to block the lanes off why not put three farking extra lanes for everyone?

Denver isn't too bad about it's HOV and Toll Lanes since you exit left off the interstate to get to them, instead of just taking up extra lanes on the interstate. They're hardly worth driving down unless it's rush hour though.

Because the explicit cost per mile of paving doesn't equal the real overall cost of driving SOVs or eating up natural resources or ruining neighborhoods or any of the other additional costs of driving.

The "real cost" of driving a car has no relation to this article or government policy. Fees charged to drive are rarely spent on remediation. Sometimes 10% of the cost of a road goes to a sound barrier. Look at the carbon tax proposal floated about a year ago. (I think it was Kennedy's, but I could be wrong.) It proposed to charge car drivers twice the tax as other oil users for the same level of emissions. Not because CO2 is worse when it comes from moving a person around in a car. Just because the government can get away with it and the anti-car constituency eats it up.

TheSignPost: Couldn't they make better use of the extra lanes...? Maybe, I don't know, open it up to regular traffic....?

Then who would pay for the roads? Oh ya, it'd be like in bunches of other places, where you jack people who take trains for the same amount of road funding because it's rolled into property taxes and federal-level taxes anyways. Fark that, you want to ride down the road all by yourself in a car, you should pay an amount proportionate to the cost of the road.

ZAZ: Just because the government can get away with it and the anti-car constituency eats it up.

Yeah. Other than NYC, the "anti car consitutency" is less than 10% of the population so it's probably not the most politically expedient way to go. Perhaps it's a policy issue that improves a big-picture outcome instead.

Seth'n'Spectrum:

Agreed, the bus price is 3.50. That's $140 a month for 2 ways 5 days a week.

st.theresa: You're encouraged to go live on a deserted island and see how well that works for you.

Actually I live in Portland, which is considered a "model" city for transit. Yet, the transit here sucks. Unless you commute to downtown from one of a few spots, the system will take you 8-10 times as long as driving. And we're filled with ass-hats like you who think freeways should never be built, and transit will solve all of our problems.

It won't, it never will, just like freeways never will alone either. Trying to force people to take transit is just stupid, it will happen if the system is built right and the zoning is present. Otherwise you're just making other people pay for service that doesn't benefit them at all, and giving nothing back.

ZAZ: Because the explicit cost per mile of paving doesn't equal the real overall cost of driving SOVs or eating up natural resources or ruining neighborhoods or any of the other additional costs of driving.

The "real cost" of driving a car has no relation to this article or government policy. Fees charged to drive are rarely spent on remediation. Sometimes 10% of the cost of a road goes to a sound barrier. Look at the carbon tax proposal floated about a year ago. (I think it was Kennedy's, but I could be wrong.) It proposed to charge car drivers twice the tax as other oil users for the same level of emissions. Not because CO2 is worse when it comes from moving a person around in a car. Just because the government can get away with it and the anti-car constituency eats it up.

Yes, it's anti-car of me to think that people who use the roads should actually pay more for roads than people who use mass transit. Back when things made sense, it was conservatism that preached that you should pay for what you use, instead of having the government tax the hell out of you, then give your money to subsidizing a bunch of elitists who think they're too good to pay taxes for mass-transit project and too good to actually take the train.

eddyatwork: Express and HOV lanes piss me off. Instead of taking up three lanes worth of road to have the Jersey barriers to block the lanes off why not put three farking extra lanes for everyone?


Because in the long term, that solution does little to alleviate congestion. In the short term, there will be temporarily congestion relief, but a common idea in transportation planning is that adding freeway lanes simply induces more demand for single occupancy travel in automobiles because that mode is made much more attractive by the fact that there is NOW less congestion from the additional freeway lanes. Cost, as measured by the amount to time spent commuting, decreases, and so yeah, everyone will alter their behavior and start driving again, or new people to the area will drive instead of take transit, until eventually it's all clogged up again.

HOV and their variant, HOT (High Occupancy Toll) lanes are aimed at changing behavior, which is probably the best beat to alleviating congestion in the long run.

davidphogan: st.theresa: You're encouraged to go live on a deserted island and see how well that works for you.

Actually I live in Portland, which is considered a "model" city for transit. Yet, the transit here sucks. Unless you commute to downtown from one of a few spots, the system will take you 8-10 times as long as driving. And we're filled with ass-hats like you who think freeways should never be built, and transit will solve all of our problems.

It won't, it never will, just like freeways never will alone either. Trying to force people to take transit is just stupid, it will happen if the system is built right and the zoning is present. Otherwise you're just making other people pay for service that doesn't benefit them at all, and giving nothing back.

No, people shouldn't be forced to take transit. They should be forced to pay an amount proportional to whatever mode of transportation they choose though.

Portland is considered a model city for mass-transit because it only takes (on average) 3.4 times as long to get somewhere (NHTS, 2003). The crux of it is, even in a city like Portland, they spend more than 100x more on roads (including federal money) than they do on other mass transportation projects. People who say mass transit can't work are people who basically think that if you try in a half-assed manner to do something, and you don't succeed, that it's somehow proof that the project itself was flawed. It's kind of like after FEMA totally botched Katrina, how people said FEMA couldn't work... despite proof that it had worked in the past, and the failure was in implementation. Mass-transit works great in a ton of other places, and can work well here in the US, the only problem is getting people to realize that no form of transportation (air, rail, road, anything) is inherently a money-maker... we offer massive subsidies to individual drivers in the form of charging non-drivers nearly the same amount for the roads, yet we largely refuse to invest in any kind of competitive systems

davidphogan: Trying to force people to take transit is just stupid, it will happen if the system is built right and the zoning is present. Otherwise you're just making other people pay for service that doesn't benefit them at all, and giving nothing back.

Do you eat at a fast food restaurant? Do you occasionally go to low-cost retail stores? Do you go to grocery stores? All of these places hire people who might not be able to work there without mass transit because minimum wage jobs don't afford housing, groceries, basic living necessities PLUS a personal vehicle. If low-wage people didn't have mass transit, employers would have to pass additional costs on to the consumer (YOU) to cover either additional transit arrangements OR higher wages to allow for vehicles as the employee's budget.

firefly212: Then who would pay for the roads? Oh ya, it'd be like in bunches of other places, where you jack people who take trains for the same amount of road funding because it's rolled into property taxes and federal-level taxes anyways. Fark that, you want to ride down the road all by yourself in a car, you should pay an amount proportionate to the cost of the road.

Except roads, especially major roads like freeways, aren't just for single-citizen use. Do you like food? Computers? Chairs? Good news, you've benefited from highways! The purpose of the interstate highway system was at least partially to expedite the transport of men and material in a time of war as well. In CA, roads are SUPPOSED to be paid/maintained for by a gas tax, so you could argue the more you use the roads the more tax you pay and a toll is thus unnecessary. Of course we have the most brain-dead legislature in the 50 states and they "borrow" against this fund to pay for social welfare programs and an epic-failing education system, instead of maintaining our existing infrastructure. Ta-da!

Not going to bother with the "true cost of driving" argument since it seems some other have that one covered already.

Constance Velocity: Population control = best traffic solution.

We don't need more lanes, we need less people.

Also magically works for pollution mitigation, abundant water supplies, etc, etc.