Toll road terminus, mainline toll booth,
(pair of) ramp toll booth
Toll road terminus, mainline toll booth,
(pair of) ramp toll booth
Sometimes the cost of building a particular road or bridge cannot be justified through the usual taxpayer-supported ways and means. More and more new roads are being paid for by user tolls. This wouldn't usually be a problem for he traveller as long as the toll booths can be managed by the user. We've added the tool booths to RVTrek so that the traveller can be aware when they are coming up and be prepared.
There are three icons used by RVTrek to display the presence of tolls on the nation's highways: mainline toll booths, which interrupt all of traffic on a highway, ramp toll booths which occur only on entry and exit ramps for he highway, and a pair of terminus icons which indicate the beginning and end of a toll road.
Toll bridges and tunnels toll the traffic using the bridge or tunnel in question. Often the tolling authority will only toll one way through, saving some money on the necessary structures, and generally assuming that users will cross a structure both ways in he course of their travelling. Since there is only one mainline structure, these are indicated by a single terminus icon at he location of the toll booth. The notes indicate that they are either All Way or just in one direction.
Many tolled facilities are now making use of electronic "passes" to facilitate the automatic collection of tolls. Such a pass is an electronic box which mounts (usually) somewhere on the vehicle's windshield. Upon approaching a toll booth the box will be "read" by an overhead antenna, and it will identify the user's pre-arranged credit account with the tolling authority, which will be debited for the toll. A lite on the box will light up, telling the driver that he need not stop at the booth, but rather use a bypass lane and avoid the stop. Of course, that allows for abuse, as no one is usually watching the bypass lanes. However, systems are in place to photograph any vehicles making use of this bypass, and the state vehicle licensing system is used to collect substantial fines for such non-compliance. Because using a pass substantially reduces manpower costs for the authority, the users of a pass are generally encouraged with discounts on their tolls from the manually-collected tolls.
Many toll roads are going to all-electronic toll taking. As mentioned in the paragraph above, some of the toll road's users will have passes, and they will be debited as usual. Those using an all electronic toll road without a pass are photographed as above, but rather than fined, they are simply either mailed a monthly bill or posted on the authority's website, and may pay by credit card. Those who don't pay are issued tickets or simply passed along to commercial bill collection agencies. Again the use of the pass is usually discounted. Since there are no toll booths on such automated toll roads, the only indicators of their existance in RVTrek are the red terminus icons for the toll road's start and end.
The passes seem to be good for both the drivers and the authorities, in cutting down time-wasting toll lines and in reducing the manpower and infrastructure costs associated with the booths - maintaining he electronic infrastructure is cheaper than the manual ones. The only fly-in-the-ointment is that nearly every state with toll facilities has its own incompatible pass, which works on their facilities but not on any other state's. Texas has three such independent authorities, and the confusion can be great. Thankfully this seems to just be a growing pain in the evolution of toll roads, as the three Texas authorities have agreed to make a single pass available for all their common systems. Likewise, the EZPass is becoming a super-state alternative, whose pass is recognized in several northeastern states, and by doing so, each state's pass is recognized in the other states as well (though not without rancor in some areas - sometimes the discount is only offered to the local passes, and no to the out-of-state passes). Another growing pain, I suppose. At any rate, the immediate information in the toll icon includes which of the two dozen or so passes are accepted there.
Some Chicago toll roads; the Chicago Skyway on the right, parts of the
Ronald Regan Tollway, Tristate Tollway, and Veterans Memorial on the left.
Detail of the Chicago Skyway. Skyway mainline toll booths in image above.
The tolling authority's website is the target of the information link. Most all of them have such a website to publish their most current toll rates. Some, such as some of New York's, are very bareboned, and for some facilities, completely absent of information; others are full of photographs and other data. In the cases where the data is thin, we refer instead to the Wikipedia pages for information. While it is not guaranteed to be the official data, it is usually updated much more quickly than the official sites, and is fairly uniform in having a generous amount of information available.
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