That High Occupant Vehicle lane that you use on occasion is going to become a toll lane available to Low Occupant People who want to pay for the ability to use the lane when they are by themselves in the car.
You say, “Great idea!” It is a voluntary tax the state can use make some more money to keep up the roads!
Although described as “user fees,” motorists who pay expected tolls to use existing lanes on Interstates 95 and 395 in Virginia will not be paying for improved road maintenance or new road capacity anywhere in Northern Virginia under proposals expected to begin construction later this year. Instead, motorists taxed to drive on existing lanes will find their money used to subsidize new buses, “enhance 12 existing bus stations,” and improve rail service in the city of Fredericksburg.
The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) last year entered an agreement with Fluor-Transurban, a company that will construct, operate and provide routine maintenance for “High Occupancy Toll” lanes constructed on existing high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes on I-95/395. Vehicles with three or more passengers would continue to use the lanes for free, but single passengers could pay a variable toll to buy their way in. To keep the complex system running, a $50 million infrared tolling camera system would scan every passing vehicle and image both the driver and passengers. When the computer believes fewer than three people are on board and a toll has not been paid, a ticket will be sent in the mail.
And good luck fighting that ticket.
Letting citizens volunteer to pay a tax IS a great idea. Taking their money and not using it to maintain the roads they’re using in the process, or building new capacity is idiotic.
Make traffic flow so well that no one needs to pay the toll, then worry about funding for services that the minority of commuters use. Or, gasp, make the fees for bus use and train use relative to what they cost to operate.
Washington State has been mismanaging funding (supplied by automobile fees) while keeping ferry-user fees so inexpensive for so long that that communities have sprung up around the terminals. People who work in Seattle have moved to Bremerton and Port Orchard. Hell, the entire population of Whidby Island would be out numbered by deer without the nation’s largest ferry service. In just the last couple years we’ve been having so many boats taken down for service or simply dropped from the line up that now the people who built their lives and livelihoods around this service are finding that they’re SOL.
At least they will hopefully have learned a little lesson in not trusting the government like that again.
Can’t understand why the island people don’t form a corporation to build and maintain their own ferryboats.
One of the things I’m considering doing when I retire, if I retire in WA, is running for the Legislature.
And making the ferry system pay for itself, or completely privatizing the damn thing, will be one of the planks in my platform.
Yeah, I’ll probably have to run on the East Side of the Mountains.