RE: The case for (urban) road tolls
Hey, @tobixen.
To toll or not to toll? Actually, I guess the question isn't whether or not to do it, it's being done, it's whether or not it will encourage whatever habits its meant to encourage, and barring that, whether it will be enough to cover the costs associated with the driving.
From what I got from this post, neither is very likely, especially in the areas where it's most needed for a change in driving—the urban areas.
As far as I know, there aren't many toll roads in Oregon. In fact, I can only think of a toll bridge. Everything else is paid for and maintained through taxpayer dollars. And of anything, I have to say the State of Oregon does some of the best road maintenance I've seen in the western United States.
Our population is pretty low, but I know we have visitors flowing from Washington and California, and elsewhere, so tolls along I-5 could come into place in short order.
There definitely needs to be a balance struck between overuse (or using the car when there's other means, or really not a need) and not being able to use it all, or being restricted in daily use for work and other things.
But then that sets it up for someone to decide what is needful and what is not, and takes the decision making away from the individual.
So, back and forth you go with no real solution in sight other than the ones that get imposed that no one seems to like. I wonder if the tolls would be that more appealing if taxes were lower? i don't know what it is in Norway, but I've understood that taxes are fairly high in all of the Scandinavian countries, due to the socialist leanings of the leaders/people you wrote about.
There's only so much that can be taxed, and then you're taking away from whatever disposable income there might be, which are then taken in a toll, essentially another tax, but based on use, rather than income, property or some other means.
What do you think should happen, and what do you think will happen in the coming years?
Right
Hm, didn't I write that it is indeed working? On the short term, car usage does go down as the tolls go up, and some drivers do move their driving to outside the peak hours as extra peak hour charges are levied. On the long term the effects are even more pronounced as fewer people opt for car ownership and fewer businesses will rely on their employees and customers to be driving to the location.
From what I can read, the most striking example was in Trondheim, where the politicians dropped the urban road tolls but soon enough had to reintroduce them as the urban center got really jammed. (from what I've read, I've admittedly not observed it myself).
Hmmm. Okay. Well the second part of what I said before the quote was based on this:
The first part, regarding driver behavior, was based on the observations you were making about people seemingly finding ways to get around tolls, or complaining about them while still paying the tolls, and the fact that the rich would still use the roads while the poorer would be left out, and your wife's insistence that driving would be cheaper than public transportation, because either the tolls were too low or the public transportation cost was too high.
At any rate, if you say it's working, then it is.
It's obvious that something needs to happen to properly maintain infrastructure while also trying to evenly place the burden of it on those who use it most.
Like, people driving a bit earlier or a bit later to avoid the extra peak hour charge. Well, that's wanted behaviour, to reduce congestions it's nice that people try to avoid that extra premium. Though, it gets a bit silly if there is a congestion at 06:20 and no traffic at all at 06:30, just because the premium period starts at 06:30. Then again, that's easy to fix by adjusting the fee structure.
Another way to "find a way around the tolls" is to buy an EV, the EVs are going for free or for a reduced rate through most of the toll checkpoints, they are still allowed to use the priority lanes (for buses, taxis and EVs) where there are such lanes, I believe they have quite much free parking. EVs can also be bought with 0% VAT, while there are stiff import taxes on other cars. While I think the EV-drivers should pay more, it's easy to see that the regulations are effective - around 50% of all new cars sold now are electric - and a significant portion of the rest are hybrids. There are even waiting lists as the car importers can't source EVs fast enough.
Okay, well, it's interesting to see how it all unfolds.
The little experience I've had with toll roads leads me to believe that if there is another road to be taken, it will be the one that's used, to avoid the toll. I think we were in Texas the instance I'm thinking about, where a few years old toll road had been built which was actually faster and of course a much less bumpy road surface than the roads previously built and falling into somewhat disrepair. Instead of using the newer toll road that was in better shape and faster to get to their destination, most drivers were avoiding it, taking the longer way around, and continuing to wear down the roads even more.
I know, because as a visitor, I was doing the same thing in an attempt to avoid paying any tolls.
The other place was in Maryland, where we did get hit for tolls. To this day, I don't even know which freeway(s) it may have been, since the signs that talked about them weren't that clear as to when they might start or end, since they only seemed to be for stretches at a time, and not necessarily in contiguous fashion.
Regardless of the merits, there needs to be a way to maintain infrastructure, slow down the rate of pollution and environmental/health/livability erosion, and I'm sure, since consumption fees or taxes seem to be the fairest way to get all users to pay their fair share, these toll roads will become more and more prevalent everywhere. It will be interesting to see what the reactions are from different societies and cultures as that sort of thing continues to progress.
Of course. If the wanted behaviour is that the cars should drive on the new road, the toll collection should be on the old roads instead! :-)
In Norway, if we put a toll gate on some main road, we often either put toll gates on the parallel old local roads or make physical barriers on them so that it's impossible to drive through on the old local roads.
The urban tolls are organized in a "ring" (soon there will be multiple rings), and the road system is designed so that one has to drive through a checkpoint to get from the outside of the ring to the inside. They want all the through-traffic onto the major roads and only allow local traffic on the roads in the residental areas, they typically put up physical barriers to prevent cars from using the local roads for transit traffic - hence they can manage to create such circles without putting up too many checkpoints.
Sometimes there are problems with car drivers trying to sneak by driving on the roads for bikes and pedestrian, or otherwise drive on places where there shouldn't be cars at all. Some of the checkpoints have extra cameras facing the bike roads, other places there are physical barriers preventing such abuse.
I believe the overhead is relatively big (should probably do some research on it), but still the public gets quite much money out of it.
Also, I believe they have raised the tolls threefold over the last years. The administration costs should be fairly constant, hence this should reduce the percent of money lost into administration costs (unless there is too much corruption going on). The administration costs also ought to be much lower today, as most of it is fully automated, compared to earlier years when there actually was real people staffing each checkpoint, even manually opening and closing real gates ...
The good thing with tolls is that the decision is firmly left where it belongs: to every individual. Is this car drive really worth the costs? (Unfortunately individuals tends to be quite bad decision makers, not bothering to do the proper calculations, and underestimating/overestimating to confirm their existing biases, but that's another story).
To some, perhaps, but in general I don't believe so
Right
The taxing has a quite clear social profile, and we also do get benefits, like child support money (which hasn't been inflation-adjusted for ages though, to it's not enough to support the costs), hence taxes shouldn't stop people from having "enough" disposable income.
Taxes based on income is a bit problematic as it's often quite easy to get around it (doing unregistered "black" work), taxes on property can also be problematic as those who has the most may easily move some of the property abroad or hide it (and it's hard to tax things like bitcoin possessions, gold possessions etc if the owner doesn't want to be taxed), usage taxes are more difficult to sneak away from - while the poorest easily can avoid being taxed simply by avoiding usage.