Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

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Road tolls are quite undesirable. Tolls require some toll collecting apparatus which wastes that portion of the collected funds and may have negative externalities (e.g. increased surveillance, increased air pollution or reduced road capacity due to slowing for toll booths). Moreover, it discourages productive use of the road. If a toll discourages use of a road at any point in time when the road is being used at less than its full capacity then you're "wasting" the road and creating secondary inefficiencies, e.g. fewer people in the office park on one side of the toll road will travel the road to visit a coffee house on the other side which causes the coffee house to lose business, and allows a different coffee house that happens to be in the opposite direction from the office park to raise prices and gouge the workers in the office park.

You can see the obvious analogies with patents on publicly funded research.

This is to be distinguished from congestion pricing which has nothing to do with paying for the road and should only apply at the times when the road would otherwise have insufficient capacity for the traffic volume, with the explicit intent of reducing usage. Note however that congestion pricing can be inefficient for many of the same reasons and is also undesirable unless the alternatives of expanding road capacity or improving mass transit to reduce traffic volume are both impractical.

I disagree with that entire premise.

Yes it requires technology to collect the tolls. We have that down to a pretty efficient science these days thanks to cameras. They don't even slow down traffic to collect tolls.

I've never encountered a toll road that wasn't a major expressway. The coffee house argument is non-sensical.

Toll roads have a very attractive benefit to me. I don't drive. I'm kind of happy to have the people who make the decision to live far away from their work to actually pay for the cost of their commute.

> Yes it requires technology to collect the tolls. We have that down to a pretty efficient science these days thanks to cameras. They don't even slow down traffic to collect tolls.

The technology costs money, it creates bureaucracy, and it wastes time. You get an EZ-Pass, you now have more charges to reconcile on your credit card which wastes time (multiply by XX million people this turns out to be a lot of wasted time), some people have to be hired to work in a call center to answer calls, maintain webservers, repair road sensors, do enforcement against people who don't pay, etc. etc. Then it's the government, so they're going to get some private company to do it, which is going to hire a bunch of lobbyists (more wasted resources), which are then going to lobby hard to keep as much of the collected money in their own pockets as bureaucratically possible.

Also, the automated systems make the surveillance problem worse by an order of magnitude or more.

> I've never encountered a toll road that wasn't a major expressway. The coffee house argument is non-sensical.

How is it that someone can't work near an onramp to a major expressway and the nearest coffee house be at the next exit or just across a toll bridge?

To get to the point, are you questioning the premise that increasing the price of something can discourage productive uses of that thing?

> Toll roads have a very attractive benefit to me. I don't drive.

Do you also grow everything you eat in your back yard, never buy anything in a local store or have it delivered by UPS and will never require any emergency vehicles to come to your home or work for any reason?

> How is it that someone can't work near an onramp to a major expressway and the nearest coffee house be at the next exit or just across a toll bridge?

Solve it the way Houston does: frontage roads.

You want to have a toll road and a parallel non-toll frontage road? Won't all the traffic end up on the frontage road to avoid the toll?

Also, "frontage bridge" is probably not cost effective.

No, the frontage road is slower and has traffic lights, not to mention cars moving on and off since the frontage roads are lined with commercial businesses. The toll roads can go up to 85mph (theoretically, not sure any allow that yet) while frontage roads rarely go above 55.

I lived in Houston for quite some time, plenty of people out in the suburbs are willing to pay the toll to avoid traffic and get downtown faster. Houston is also getting rid of its cash lanes and moving towards EZ-Tag only which doesn't require drivers to slow down at all.

In Texas it's quite standard to have a highway (toll or not) with a frontage road. Land isn't exactly scarce here, it's not uncommon to have a highway with 3-6 lanes on either side and a frontage road with another 2-4 lanes on either side again.

Oh, I get it now. I looked up the toll amounts in Houston. Compare:

http://www.panynj.gov/bridges-tunnels/tolls.html

Also, if you want to see a Bing Maps bug, tell it to give you directions from Newark, NJ to New York, NY and check the "avoid tolls" box. It spins for a few seconds and then says "Driving directions are temporarily unavailable." Most of the other map websites when you check the avoid tolls box it just says it couldn't avoid the tolls. I had a GPS at one point that would actually plot the route but it makes a trip that would take less than a half hour instead take more than 6 hours because to avoid a toll you have to cross the Hudson River in Albany. Obviously they've had to remove that route from the maps lest the tolls be raised a little bit more and it become cost effective.

Reminds me of the tolls on the Bay Area bridges from when I lived in California. Definitely don't miss that, or the backup trying to get across the Carquinez.

One reason for tolls (and patents from public research) is that they cause the people who use them to pay, instead of everyone. That seems reasonable to me in those instances where the road or invention isn't clearly for the public good of the whole public.

The flaw in this argument is that if it isn't for the public good of the whole public then the government shouldn't be doing it in the first place. The reason the government has to do it at all is that the benefits are so diffuse within the population that private collective action is incapable of overcoming the transaction costs.

In order for the government to fairly collect based on the utility of the roads, they would have to go out and pay all the transaction costs to determine the correct amounts -- how much should someone without a car be paying for the roads for the benefit of allowing mail and packages to be delivered, or of having goods they can buy delivered to local stores, or of having a timely emergency response? Shouldn't people more likely to need an ambulance be paying more for roads ambulances can use? Shouldn't trucks that deliver necessities be paying a higher toll since the recipients clearly benefit from them more than trucks delivering frivolous things? How do we determine what proportion of the value of some delivery of goods or other use of the road is attributable to the existence of the road, and what do we use as a reference to calculate the alternative in each case?

Apportioning the value of the roads to the people who find them useful is utterly hopeless. And if you're not going to do it right, and doing it wrong causes both unfairness and economic inefficiency, you ought not to do it at all and just fund it through general taxation.

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