Posted on 04/14/2018 10:53:53 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
It's time to mount a serious campaign to end tolls in Miami-Dade County. Any time the government wants to charge people money, we should be allowed to vote on it. Florida's Turnpike Enterprise and the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority (MDX) are highway robbers preying on predominantly poor motorists struggling to have a roof over their heads, put food on the table, and take care of their families.
I remember the days when there was only one toll on State Road 112 when you left Miami International Airport to get to Miami Beach. Now there are tolls on virtually every major highway in the county. Worse yet, Florida's Turnpike and MDX took down all the toll plazas and charge more money if drivers don't get a SunPass. Cameras take pictures of license plates every time you travels these toll roads, and months later you get a bill for hundreds of dollars. It's ridiculous.
MDX is a joke. It was created in 1994 by the Florida Legislature and the county commission under the premise that Miami-Dade would do a better job of operating local roads such as the Airport Expressway and the Gratigny Parkway.
The authority is controlled by a board of nine members, eight of whom are local business and civic leaders appointed by the governor and the county commission. In other words, the politicians created an entity that is accountable only to them, not the residents of Miami-Dade.
According to MDX's toll-rate schedule, it would cost a commuter who crosses all five expressways from beginning to end $85.75 during a five-day workweek with a SunPass. Without a Sunpass, the cost jumps to $171.50. And that doesn't include all the service charges MDX tacks on, including a fee just to send you a bill. Yearly, it would cost a motorist $8,232 to use all the expressways under MDX's jurisdiction. Imagine how much more money it costs drivers who have to tack on trips on Florida's Turnpike.
The most recent U.S Census data shows the median household income in Miami-Dade is $44,224. It's less than half of that amount for African-American households. Think about the single moms working two jobs who have to drive these expressways to drop off their children, or the construction worker going home from the job site in downtown Miami to Little Havana. Then there are the people living in South Miami-Dade who have to commute in two to three hours of rush-hour traffic each way.
They are paying to sit in gridlock that has been amplified by the nonstop reconstruction of roadways and the interchanges on the Dolphin Expressway. This is not Dubai, where everyone is an oil sheik who can treat tolls like pocket change. But if anyone tried to put tolls on the William Lehman Causeway by Aventura or the Julia Tuttle and MacArthur Causeways into Miami Beach, watch how fast the rich people from those cities would shut it down.
Meanwhile, MDX is flush with cash. It has spent more than $3.3 billion on expressway projects since its inception and is about to complete a five-year capital improvement program to replace and repair the existing program and build new toll roads that costs more than $1.4 billion. Yet there are serious concerns about the way MDX manges its purse strings. Just last month, the authority lost a major lawsuit. A judge ruled it has to pay an ex-contractor, Electronic Transactions Consultants Corp., $53.3 million for damages incurred by the firm and interest.
It's time to get a petition going and let the people decide if we want to abolish tolls.
>> Anyone who doesn’t want to pay can take surface roads.
Not always. When Gov. Good Hair Rick Perry was looking at selling Texas’ tollways to Spain, there was a “non-compete” clause to prohibit construction of free feeder roads alongside the tollways.
>>That would explain the middle school level of writing.
It’s a New Times publication (akin to Village Voice Media).
AKA an alt-left hippie sex-drug weekly paper (the kind that used to be financed by massive escort and strip joint ads in the back).
With the investigation of Backpage.com, that revenue stream has dried up and those publications no longer publish print editions, they are strictly online entities.
Some sections up north may have been opened earlier, but the opening of all 165 miles was in 1955. I remember riding our bikes on the not-yet-finished roadway when I was maybe 11 or 12 years old.
Emmaus has an awesome yarn shop. Conversational Threads. :-)
>>Toll roads are not scams. There’s no free lunch. Somebody has to pay for constructing and maintaining highways.
They ARE scams. In Houston, the original agreement was the Beltway 8 tollway would operate as a free highway after the debt was paid off. Instead they continue to borrow against it and use the money for NON-tollway projects.
It IS a scam. It is a tax. You aren’t paying it for the upkeep.
PRs are citizens. So they don't have to "pop out" any more, though if they do so the check is bigger!
+2
I meant the “illegals” popping out citizens, not the PRs. Although for decades most of them wanted autonomy from the US, but all of the sudden, BAMMMMM!!! they want to be a State.
What’s scarey about all this is that there are some poorer states that are going to look at this & think they can make it work for them. People on fixed income aren’t traveling much as it is,so I guess they will stay home & die.
bingo
Cities are bastions of Liberalism.
I predicted then that eventually we would have technology to read license plates and that motorists would be billed monthly for using the roadways. Tolls would rapidly expand and increase from that point on.
It was like when credit cards first came out. People thought it was great to pay for goods and services without the inconvenience of handing over cash (and waiting to receive change). Then the monthly bill came and often consumers would pay the conveniently suggested "minimum payment" as their balance grew larger and larger.
My monthly toll bill is now averaging $60 a month! It's hard to believe there was a time not too long ago when I kept a few quarters in my cupholder and that was enough to take care of whatever tolls I ran into. Those were halycon days!
Believe it or not, that's what our tax money used to go towards. You know, the money the government involuntarily deducts from our paychecks? As a "general taxpayer" as you refer to us by, I do not notice my taxes going down on account of motorists paying higher tolls.
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