Because so much of our earnings are diverted to things like tolls (toll operators are in the Teamsters Union and every time you pay a toll, the majority of what you pay is to pay that jackass to sit in the booth and grip that you are not handing him the money kindly enough and to fatten their pensions) “”””
Speaking of tolls:
There is a movement afoot in San Francisco to close ALL the toll booths on the Golden Gate Bridge & make everyone who is using the bridge pay with a ‘Fast Pass” type of system. You open an electronic account with the bridge operator system & put in a deposit & every time you pass thru, it deducts from that deposit.
Then they can close ALL of the toll booths.
One big question:
What about TOURISTS?
I cannot imagine that this would be profitable to do, when you have a fair amount of tourist activity in SF & they spend alot of money every year to promote such tourism.
I am also sure that other users of the bridge are not even ‘tourists’- such as myself when I went to a horse event & crossed that bridge, with my dually & horse trailer.
I sure don’t want to go thru a worse part of town & cross over on another bridge.
How about trucking companies?
We already have that on the East Coast, called EZ Pass.
What I object to is the fact that the same portion of your toll money is going to the unions to do no work. The other objection is that the government can then use that digital data to track your coming and going, how fast you are traveling, etc.
And you know with that digital data, they will eventually move over to the “public” roads to track and eventually establish a “travel tax” for how many miles you drive (which they have already proposed a couple of times in Washington and Oregon using satellite and GPS technology.)