Barone’s love of tolls and their benefits is so one-sided it isn’t funny. It wouldn’t surprise me if doesn’t even own a car. Most tolls are predicated on a bald faced lie - that it will end when the ‘whatever’ is paid for.
In the end, they are another tax and a perpetual entitlement for the authorities that create and man them.
The best of all would be getting rid of the 17th Amendment and putting the US Senate back in control of State legislatures.
Back in August, we inadvertently strayed on to a toll section of the road surrounding Raleigh. There were no toll booths. We drove a very few miles and got off....... we paid no toll.
Weeks later, we got a toll bill in the mail .A camera got our tag number and traced it through Tennessee DOT and mailed the bill. The toll was $0.41 the postage was I believe $0.48. The postage was more than the toll.
Is Washington’s power fading away? Not hardly. Now, if you said that the power of the senate and congress is fading away, that I’ll agree. Question: “HOW MANY LAWS HAS CONGRESS & SENATE PASSED?” Answer; “NOT A HELL OF A LOT”. Now question: “HOW MANY “RULES & REGULATIONS” HAVE THESE “ALPHABET GOVERNMENT AGENCIES” PASSED”? Answer: “ALMOST HALF A MILLION”. As it stands now, we really don’t need the senate or congress in Washington. Because they are being made inconsequential. The “REAL” law makers in Washington are the BUREAUCRATS in all these GOVERNMENT AGENCIES.
Interstates would make trucking transportation cheaper at a time when overregulation was making freight rail uneconomic. …A double whammy, IOW. Overregulate a free-market mode while centralizing the infrastructure of its “competition”.
Gas tax replaced by tolls? Augmented by, maybe, not replaced.
What the hell is he smoking???? Washington RUNS our lives!!
If an idea is beneficial and workable, there will be local support for it. The federal government doesn’t need to redistribute tax revenues (which will surely be done on a political basis) to promote development, it just needs to get out of the way. The states will find a better way to get the job done. But unfortunately, politicians only want to spend other people's money to enhance their own careers and power.
New roads and bridges are needed in some places and, more important, existing roads need to be maintained, repaired and upgraded.
Re my point above, what happened to all the stimulus money? Wasn’t that supposed to go to upgrading our national infrastructure? The truth about that is that nobody knows where it all went. The only thing we can be sure of is that it was “re-distributed”.
So gas tax revenues are insufficient to replenish the Highway Trust Fund. Congress could increase the gas tax, but won’t; it’s highly unpopular and only a handful of members favor an increase. Barack Obama understands that and is not seeking one.
Here in a nutshell is the scam being perpetrated on the American people. Gas tax revenues have been spent by an out of control Congress on things unrelated to highways. An example might be rail projects, or mass transit boondoggles, etc.
So the idea now is to get states to bail out the Transportation Trust Fund (TTF), which they seem eager to do. Well the fix needs to take place in Washington, before we add to the problem. Do not let your state legislators buy into this scam of continuing redistribution of wealth.
The TTF is only empty because Congress emptied it by spending too much.
“New roads and bridges are needed in some places and, more important, existing roads need to be maintained, repaired and upgraded.”
True that. But the Fed Trust Fund is depleted by moving it to light rail projects and by a voracious bureaucracy. The light rail projects it funds pay for construction costs, not operating costs and come with very expensive mandates.
The states who accept the light rail money are saddled with light rail systems whose operating costs are about 5x revenue and they still have to comply with the mandates (special buses that pick up and drop off disabled people — operating expenses at 60x revenue). So the states go looking for ways to maintain the system—fees, taxes, public private partnerships.
The transit mandates are designed to push people out of single family homes and cares and into dense, “affordable housing,” clustered around transit locations. The Agenda 21 advocates in the states leap on this and become real estate development districts instead of transit districts, exercising eminent domain to make deals with real estate developers work, with all the corruption that comes with that.
Nothing in this reduces federal gas tax, federal revenue, federal bureaucracy or federal mandates. Nothing in this reduces federal power. It just increases fees, taxes, and bureaucracy at the state level. If that’s power flowing back to the states, you can have it. It’s power and money flowing from the people to governments.
Meanwhile, roads and bridges rot because of spending priorities at both the federal and state level. Light rail is cool. Roads are not.
Environmental regulations
Save a tree kill a beaver.
“...and fees can be adjusted to discourage congestion at peak-use hours, as is being done in Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Texas and Virginia.”
And JUST WHO gets to ‘adjust’ the tolling, and JUST HOW do they plan to collect the tolls without tracking our every movement.
...or perhaps the Democrats are right and conservatives are a bunch of TOTAL IDIOTS.
There are states that would JUST LOVE to get their hands on their Interstates for tolling, starting with Pennsylvania, on I-80, which is loaded with trucks passing through.
Pennsylvania could practically get rid of their state income tax, if they are allowed unrestricted tolling on that highway.
Not the country that I grew up in, and not the country I want to leave for my kids.