So I’m driving home from those Godforsaken Northern Suburbs of Chicago - the type of places that are so painfully McMansion-Affluent-Suburbia-Strip-Mall-Sodomy that they make Northern Virginia almost not look like Satan’s asshole by comparison - and I hit the traffic. And sit. And sit. And sit.
An hour and a half later, I finally get to the reason that traffic is backed up for miles/hours - everyone’s having to squeeze over to the slow, ineffective manual lanes (you know, the ones with the caveman in the booth taking people’s money and doling out change) because they don’t have I-Pass (the friendly robot that sits on your dashboard and lets you zip through toll lanes without stopping.
The I-Pass lanes were completely empty, but completel blocked by the pileup of people trying to get over to lumber through the manual lanes.
The whole fucking point of I-pass is that people who plunk down the money and give up the personal information to have it don’t have to wait behind all the mooing cow-people to go through tolls!!!1111111111111111
Let’s just get rid of ALL the tollbooths and use taxes to pay for roads. The concept of the tollbooth has to be the stupidest invention of modern man: In order to make the roads go, we must make the roads… stop. Frequently at points that are already bottlenecks, such as bridges.
EZ-Pass is the government’s idea of how to make it easier to pay a toll that we shouldn’t be paying. Everyone benefits from roads, even the ones a given individual doesn’t drive on.
And at the risk of being an alarmist, I think they are a safety risk. All it takes is an out-of-control tractor trailer, or perhaps a disgruntled pseudo-terrorist to make a mess of a big toll plaza. EZ pass or human toll taker.
My personal pet peeve in Pennsylvania is that they often put the EZ-Pass lanes on the crowded side of the toll plaza (e.g. the Rt 309 and Rt 611 exits on the PA Tpk).
In both places, the exit forks immediately after the toll plaza and you can choose to either wait in a huge line to go North or zoom past everybody to go South.
Unfortunately, the EZ-Pass lanes dump right into the big long North line, so even if you’re going South, you have to wait through a big backup to get through. Meanwhile, streams of non-EZ-Pass people are zooming through the left toll booths unhindered.
I thought that ridiculous road design, access and egress were de rigeur in Pennsylvannia. Maybe caused by some Penn State civil engineering professor with a wicked sense of humor.
There was construction, but this was late in the evening and it had nothing to do with the miles-long backup; the backup was caused by 10 lanes of people trying to get down to 4 lanes of manual toll booth, creating a bottleneck that blocked the I-Pass lanes.
In addition, three are only 3 or 4 lanes of traffic between the toll plazas; the road doesn’t widen to 8 or 10 lanes until a quarter mile or so right before the plazas.
Just dealt with this on Saturday. Took about an hour to go 5 miles because of the tolls.
I’ve always wondered why they can’t just set the dang things up consistently throughout the state (or even states!) (Or just eliminate them completely.)
Left lanes = E-Z Pass. Middle = Both. Right = Cash only
Or something like that. Post signs everywhere before hand.
It won’t eliminate the asses I saw that cut everyone off and blocked the lanes, but maybe it would cut down on them.
I also like the idea of having police giving out “stupidity tickets” to people who deliberately ignore the signs.
Dude, drive much around here??? It has everything to do with construction, because they have taken a number of both manual and I-pass lanes out of service for the open road tolling project. Where there used to be maybe 10 manual lanes and 3 I-pass lanes, you’re now down to 2-3 I-pass and 4 manual.
When this construction nightmare gets done, you will be able to go straight through with an I-pass without slowing down or going through a toll plaza. That should help.
Oh, and with all your recent posting, I will also recommend decaf. Really, do think about it.
