So the Ole Ball & Chain (“OBC”) and I wandered down the Florida Turnpike yesterday to take a quick gander at the Everglades. Florida, in a dedicated attempt to make traffic move as slowly as possible, has tollbooths on the highway every 20 miles or so, at which point one must pay $.75 for the privilege to continue on the Turnpike.
OBC, trooper that she is, scrounged through our change as we approached each tollbooth, hoping to find exact change, so that we might save 30 seconds by tossing our money into the basket, rather than handing our money to a turnpike employee.
We noticed something rather odd in the exact change lanes at the tollbooths - at each one, there was a turnpike employee standing by the basket observing us throw our change in.
They were doing nothing else - the whole process was automated. Just standing and watching.
Might I suggest that the Florida Turnpike could charge a tad less IF THEY WEREN’T PAYING EMPLOYEES TO STAND AROUND AND DO NOTHING!?!
heh. I WISH we had more humans at our toll booths. Pretty often the basket doesn’t register the tokens you just threw in and you have to honk your horn and wait for an attendent to come and wave you through. Sometimes it takes them a while.
A friend that I sometimes carpool with gets so pissed off that he just drives through - and twice we’ve gotten immediately pulled over by the state cops for that. The cops are nice enough about it - they never question his story - but it pisses me off that my friend has now made us both 20 minutes late due to waiting for the cop to call in his papers. Some “friend”.
Those are actually volunteers who enjoy watching cars up real close-like. You can tell by the ugly shirts they wear. No self-respecting Turnpike Employee would wear one of these.
But seriously, welcome to SoFla, and why the hell didn’t you call us?
The tuesday before Thanksgiving a frend and I went to the auto show in San Francisco. As we were crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and aproaching the toll booth, he hands me $5 for the toll. We were talking and hadn’t noticed that we were in a FasTrak lane. (A FasTrak lane is a lane where you can drive straight thru if you’ve purchased a transponder that’s registered, and they bill you rather than having to stop and pay each time.)
It wasn’t until I’d stopped and stuck my hand out the window with the $5, that I noticed that there was no one in the booth to take my money. My only choice was to continue driving past the booth, then try to cross 6 lanes of traffic so I could stop at their office and pay, or continue on and hope they missed it, or send me a bill for the toll. I’m guessing there would be a pretty hefty fine, too.
Today I received their letter advising me that my vehicle license was detected by their surveillance system going thru the FasTrak lane without a valid transponder, thus resulting in an unpaid toll.
As this is the first violation for this vehicle, the penalty amount will be waved if the toll amount is received within fifteen (15) days from the date of this notice. ($5)
Needless to say, my $5 check will be in tomorrows mail.
But THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart for just sucking it up and driving through. There is nothing worse than getting stuck behind some jackass who realized his mistake in the booth, and is trying to back out of the toll booth and get into another lane.
NY puts bars across their lanes until you pay, which I just do not understand as it creates inevitable traffic snarls.
