I agree with Edward the Head that tolls are a really bad idea in their very concept, and I’ll go one further with a wee bit of paranoia:
I think toll booths are potential terrorism targets.
All you’d need is a semi, and the ability to skid it sideways at high speed into a crowded tollbooth. Maybe pack it with some sort of explosive. Heck of a lot easier than hijacking an airplane, no?
Mach, I can see your point, however, as a terrorist target, what purpose would it serve? Know what I mean? Closing the highway? Heck, we practically do that at rush hour. It wouldn’t take out a whole lot of people - it’s not THAT crowded - there wouldn’t be anywhere NEAR 1,000 casualties - what would the reason be for hitting a tollbooth? Know what I mean? I’m curious as to why you’d think this would be a serious target.
Hah! Try driving the New Jersey Parkway sometime. It’s had toll booths regularly spaced for years. To save time and money you bought rolls of tokens at 30 for $10 (cheaper than the 35 cents per toll otherwise). I had to go through four such booths going to my parents. Or six of them going to my in-laws.
They seem to be doing away with them. They’ve installed Easy-Pass booths at some, and eliminated others entirely. I thought the GSP was the last holdout of this method of tolling, but I see I’m wrong. I’m surprised someone’s trying to introduce this nowadays.
US22 I know (though probably not that stretch, as my way of getting into State College used PA-26). When I used to go to school in PA and was headed back towards the DC area (actually closer to Annapolis) I’d take US-22 to US-522 to US-30 to I-81 to I-70 (and then some other highways in Maryland). I don’t know if it was any shorter than taking I-76 to I-83 (can you even get off at I-83?) but I’m sure it was faster, what with avoiding toll booths and Harrisburg and Baltimore and all and, even better, it was free. The only really bad parts were climbing that hill on 522 (did it in a fog once, that was scary), the construction of the US-30 I-81 interchange in Chambersburg, and the very badly designed I-81 I-70 interchange (but maybe I’m biased there having dealt with the new I-25 I-40 interchange.) Similarly, when I was taking a trip to Hershey it was US-22 pretty much all the way or with the trip to Lancaster (at least until I got to Harrisburg, then it was some state highway after that.)
Pretty boneheaded rant, to criticize “open road tolling” when what you really encountered was major road construction. Hell, they’re doing blasting on 294 down near 80, during which they completely stop traffic in both directions for up to 1/2 hour every couple of hours.
Also, to pick a nit, I believe the road you are complaining about was 294 - the Tri-State, not 90. 90 would have taken you from the skyway (toll, not I-Pass) to the Dan Ryan (free, but under MAJOR construction) out the Kennedy (also free) before you rejoined the tollway up towards Rockford and Beloit.
Sorry, but as a tourist you are simply unqualified to bitch about road construction/traffic in and around Chi. You really must give due credit to 80/94 in Indiana, a non-toll road which is PERENNIALLY under construction. And if you wanted to avoid the toll hassles, you could have taken a nice leisurely spin up the Dan Ryan! (Ha ha!)
I am firmly convinced that I-Pass is one of the greatest inventions of recent times. (Also, the I-Pass $50 charge is a refundable deposit, tho I would agree it would hardly make sense for someone passing through.) As I understand it, the various “automated” toll systems for the various states will soon be reciprocal. As an I-Pass user traveling to the east coast, I was frustrated that I could not use the automated lanes in Penn, NY, etc.
And this long-time toll road user has NEVER seen a toll abomination anywhere near the equal of the Mass/NH border on 95.
The people at IDot (and I know I’m not the only person who always reads it as “idiot”) came up with an incredibly bad idea? I’m shocked!
all this makes me very happy that CT removed the tolls from I95 …
of course, they only did it after a number of very bad accidents involving tractor trailers.
Open Road Tolling works well on the Greeneway in Orlando – sometimes the traffic gets down to 55 or so in a 65 mph zone for a couple miles or so before the toll reader but I’ve never seen the non-e-pass lanes back up all the way into the main road. Maybe this is because the Greeneway is more of a city beltway and so will have a bigger % of e-pass holders, but Orlando’s always gonna have some tourist traffic.
Really? This would so make me get an I-Pass finally. I pay less than $10 a year in Illinois tolls, simply because I don’t drive on Illinois toll roads - they don’t go where I want to. But I drive all the way through Indiana and Ohio quite a bit. If I could use just one electronic toll leash, I’d do it.
The point of terrorism is to terrorize people, to make them afraid of doing the things they would otherwise do without a second thought about their safety.
If a terrorist slammed a semi full of explosives into the backup behind the Delaware Turnpike tollbooths, killing a hundred or so persons in cars close enough to the blast, it would have exactly that effect: a lot of people would suddenly be afraid to drive the toll highways of the Northeast Corridor.
This is the first I’ve heard of “open road tolling” but I’ll use this to grouse about the Delaware Turnpike’s inability to open enough tollbooths to handle their summer weekend traffic without a 3-5 mile backup on Sunday afternoons.
I don’t terribly mind their using their 15-mile chokepoint on Northeast Corridor traffic as a big state moneymaker, but it does gall me to have to wait 20 minutes or more in the backup before I can even get to where the EZ-Pass lane is moving any faster than the rest of the backup.
B.S. I was on this highway two weeks ago. I went through some toll booths that already had the system set up–the IPass users were about 30% of the traffic on the road. The other 70% were stuck in the 15-minute standstill nightmares the OP described–and then we all had to merge back onto the road. Criminy.
What I saw as being the problem is that they have gotten rid of the automatic coin-counters in favor of real people, who have to stop to count the change. Back when you could just throw your coins in the basket, the toll plazas were… well, they weren’t okay, but it wasn’t a nightmare the way it is now.
And I always feel like kissing the ground in Indiana, when I’ve been out of it. So there.
Thanks, RT. That makes sense.
I really like open road tolling, in the places where it has been fully implemented. Then again, I have an I-Pass to make it much, much easier. Like any major reconstruction though, it’s a bitch and a half until it’s completed.
Also, it’s completely untrue that the majority of toll road users in Illinois are tourists. I recall some study (don’t remember where) that Chicago folks had the longest or second longest commute in the country, in terms of mileage. But Chicago drivers generally know enough not to use the tollways on the weekends.
I was just gonna say something like this. The Florida toll roads that have open road tolling that I’m familiar with all seem to work well – this includes SR 589, the Suncoast Parkway; SR 417, the aforementioned Greeneway; and SR 869, the Sawgrass Expressway. I love the things cause I don’t even have to slow down.
I’ll admit that my memory may have been obscured by a fog of rage, but while the area around Chicago was the worst, the whole state seemed to be this way. We were driving through Illinois from Wisconsin, and all the way along the toll road it was stop-and-go. The entire trip through the state took us much longer than it should have. Traffic was backed up for miles before each toll plaza.
It was enough to make me vow that even if it takes me 500 miles out of my way, I’ll never drive through Illinois again. I’ll go around the damn thing.
I actually did take the Dan Ryan and the JFK freeway. I’m in the process of blocking it from my memory. At points, I remember thinking we should just find a spot to abandon the car and walk because it would have been much faster.
Is the whole damn country under construction right now? It seemed like every state was undergoing a major re-construction of their interstate system. Most of the time, it wasn’t much of a bother (as long as you don’t mind threading-the-needle between concrete barriers) but in conjunction with those tollbooths, it was a nightmare.
As I said before, I’ve taken long car trips cross-country since I was a kid. This was the worst driving experience I’ve ever had. Tourist or not, I’m gonna bitch.
I wish the guy at the travel plaza would have explained it to me. Instead, he made it sound like it was just a flat fee. It wouldn’t have saved us that much time, though, because the I-Pass users were stuck in traffic with the rest of us until they could creep up to the I-Pass lanes.
Ha. What a silly assertion.
I stopped going to Chicago years ago. Poorly maintained roads that you have to pay tolls on, a sprawl so bad it’s merging with Milwaukee, etc. It takes forever to get anywhere in Chicagoland. If you visit friends in the burbs and want to do something in the city, count on absurd transit times.
Maybe you think that as a tourist I’m unqualified to bitch, but getting around that area is such a hassle that I simply stopped going, despite the fact that I had friends there for years and that I love the blues clubs there.
I shoulda stuck a little 
or maybe 
in there. Don’t get me wrong – Indiana is the ancestral homeland of my people, and I was born there, but I didn’t grow up there. The trips I’ve taken to Indiana were all enforced-togetherness-family-vacations that I hated, so Indiana is associated with that in my mind.
If you want, you can make all sorts of fun of Florida. Lord knows I do.
What?? Florida in the summer? No thanks-- it’s as hot as Hell, humid, and ya’ll have got mosquitos the size of hummingbirds. 
Not that where I am is much better right now.
Please note that at no point did I deny that traffic unambiguously sucks in and around Chicago. Just observing that someone passing through on occasion lacks a clear understanding of exactly how bad it truly is!
I perversely appreciate it when traffic is congested due to construction, compared to the all-too-frequent occasions on which it is snarled for no apparent reason whatsoever.