But you get what you pay for. When I’m driving to Chicago in a dark night with a snowstorm hitting, there is plenty of lighting from above and the highways are clear, snowless, iceless.
When I’m driving to Milwaukee on a dark night with a snowstorm hitting, I see dozens of cars pulled off to the side, and I have to drive 30mpg to avoid skidding on the snow-covered roads. And I can hardly see the road, let alone the lines that divide the lanes.
Is exit tolling “traditional” ? IIRC, barrier tolls (toll plazas in the road) were common before exit tolling. Certainly the earliest tolls weren’t exit tolls, because they weren’t on multilane highways with exits. When the interstate system was first built, was there any consensus about which type of toll system was used ?
When i was young, CT had barrier tolls on I95 (no tolls there anymore, thank OG) but the Mass Pike and NY Thruway were exit tolls … And NJ has both types.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike receives no federal funding. It is a privately owned road, owned and administrated by the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission. The tolls all go to improving the road.
So yes, they did build their own damn road.
It was built on a railroad right-of-way, so some of the areas on the Turnpike were built the way they were out of necessity. From Blue Mountain to Carlisle it’s long and straight because that’s what they had to work with. Unfortunately, it results in “highway hypnotism”. Through the mountains it has a lot of switchbacks because a train cannot simply go up and down hills, they have to work in some gradual climbs and descents.
But hey, it was the first of its kind. Mistakes were bound to be made. It’s still an awesome highway, and as I said, it was built without federal funding. If you don’t want to take the Turnpike you can take I-80 across the top of the state or you can take US Route 30, which I do NOT recommend.
This is the thing I don’t understand. Have you never driven through Chicago before? The tollbooths here have always been this way. There has always been, oh, I don’t know, maybe 4-5 tollbooths between Wisconsin and Indiana. The open-road tolling is an improvement because, if you have an I-Pass, you NEVER have to stop. That’s the point. No stopping at the beginning. No stopping at the end. No stopping in-between. If you don’t have an I-Pass, you have to stop, true, but anyone can get the I-Pass.
And low-rise office buildings, and everything in between?
Five years later is ‘suddenly’?
People were afraid to travel by air for most of the year following 9/11. (My wife and I appreciated being able to stretch out over a row of seats apiece on a Hawaii-bound flight that November.)
Washington, D.C.-area tourism dropped off substantially in the months following 9/11. (One of my favorite D.C. bookstores folded as a result; a larger share of their walk-in business than they realized was made up of out-of-towners.)
So don’t tell me 9/11 didn’t cause people to be afraid to do things they’d been doing before.
We aren’t arguing over much in the numbers; “several dozen” v. “a hundred or so” ain’t no thing.
And nobody would remember a thing, I guess.
It’s funny how people don’t react rationally. You know and I know that 9/11 killed fewer people than die on our nation’s highways each month, but 9/11 and its downstream consequences (including Iraq, since no 9/11 => no invasion) still dominates our politics and absorbs hundreds of billions of our tax dollars, five years later. Meanwhile, a comparatively trifling amount of resources (if any) have been added to our highway safety programs.
People are terrorized by bad shit that’s out of the ordinary. I remember the brief hue and cry back in the 1970s when one kid committed suicide in a way that had some connection with his involvement in Dungeons and Dragons. Kids commit suicide with some frequency, but one kid commits suicide in a way that’s connected with something strange and now suddenly scary in its otherness, and PTAs all across the country go into D&D hysteria mode.
This is precisely why I’m glad that virtually all of Kentucky’s roads are toll-free. Sure, we have to put up with more time between repavings, but you don’t have to worry about dealing with toll plazas and running out of change.
You poor thing. You should have asked someone before attempting to navigate the gauntlet. I always tell people to plan on going through Chicago after 10:00 pm and before 5:00 am. The tollway system in Chicago sucks the big one. I usually take the train when I go into the city.
One other thing to add…at one time we had the busiest tollway system in the nation. With O’Hare right there and a gazillion cars going in and out of the city, the exit system simply wouldn’t work. The congestion wouldn’t be any better.
I’ve been to Chicago but have never driven through it. (Took the trains.)
I wonder, though, if traffic will back up in the toll lanes to the point where it flows over into the freeway lanes. The pictures I saw didn’t seem like they left a huge amount of space.
My apologies. Until eight years ago, I rarely used toll roads. My parents had what seems like a moral objection to them, and it sort of “stuck” with me not to use them. My husband uses them on occasion when we travel, and the toll roads have always been at the exits, so I thought this must be a “new” system.
Ummm…you do realise that many European countries work on old-fasioned toll systems? Italy and France are two that come to mind.
Ah…makes sense, now…seems as though you do not have experience with toll booths in general. I think that the type Chicago has is the “traditional” type, and the others are examples where improvements have been attempted.
That’s a good question. In my experience so far, I would say no, this is not a problem, because most people are using I-Pass who go through the tollbooths with any regularity (the doubling the fee for cash is a powerful incentive for commuters). I have only gone through them one time on the weekend, when it is probable that the # of non-I-Pass cars would increase greatly, and it was not a problem that time, either. Hopefully, they took the potential # of non-I-Pass users into account when they planned it!
I just drove the 407 in Toronto. I was very impressed with the system and will gleefully pay the bill when it arrives in a few weeks. I think this is a far superior system to any other type toll. Even if some people don’t pay, it would undoubtedly be cheaper than to pay the salaries/wages, etc. of all the toll booth workers.
This is why I take Route 30 instead of toll portion of I-80 and likewise find alternates for I-90.
Sure, you have to deal with traffic lights and occassional slow speed zones, but your AVERAGE speed over a long distance is higher because you almost never encounter traffic jams of the sort you get on the interstates around here. A 65 mph speed limit does you no good if traffic is slowed to 5.
This is why I take Route 30 instead of toll portion of I-80 and likewise find alternates for I-90.
Sure, you have to deal with traffic lights and occassional slow speed zones, but your AVERAGE speed over a long distance is higher because you almost never encounter traffic jams of the sort you get on the interstates around here. A 65 mph speed limit does you no good if traffic is slowed to 5.
The 407 requires a transponder unless you’re willing to pay the $3.50 per trip video toll charge. That’s in addition to your normal kilometerage charge. My company prohibits me from using the 407, so if I have to run to a supplier, I happily make my salary while stuck on 401 which is a lot more costly than paying the toll would be.