Toll booths bottle up traffic. The book suggests one way toll booths. How about no toll booths? Will save money on the salaries for all the toll takers and management of the toll booths.
Where does the money come from to pay for the roads you might say? Add it to the state taxes.
Some may say this is not fair to people who do not use the roads. There are people without kids who subsidize the schools with their taxes, there are people whose houses don't catch on fire that subsidized the fire department, etc.
Point is that toll booths are inefficient (time and money) and there are many shared public expenses.
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I disagree with your analogy to public education and fire departments. These are public services, where a highway is more of a luxury service. I also disagree with your assertion that toll booths are inefficient, since many of them are automated with electronic speed pass systems.
I also disagree. I'm a firm believer in usage taxes. While not everything can/should go this route, tolls are one solid example of what should. The solution is electronic tags that record usage and bill back via a centralized billing process. No tolls, no lines, just pay as you go.
I would support this one. Tolls seem to employ people long after the road is paid for. Many folks lack the credit to fund any EZ pass type device and are then stuck in the long lines to pay their buck fifty to use the road. The highway system was built to support the military at its conception. It was built with tax payers' money and given to them to use. I also agree with the school and house analogy. I might not drive on that particular road but I would pay my taxes to assure that I could without having to wait in a line while some out of town driver searches for change.
"Many folks lack the credit to fund any EZ pass type device" In response to this, there are prepaid commuter plans that don't require credit of any kind. In Maine, it currently costs $22.20 quarterly for the unlimited use of two specific exits. For a commuter, this is roughly 36 cents a day.
Technology should allow us to charge the toll without a toll-taker or a slow-down booth. It works, it just needs to be more common. Leave one booth with a long line for people who do not register, and we take a picture of the license plates of the cheaters.
The big problem with current road funding is that it is mainly paid for by state taxes. This makes it difficult to charge road users fairly for their use, and results in very inefficient road usage.
One effect of this is that in many cities it is difficult for buses to compete with private transport for the commuter dollar, even though buses are a fundamentally much more efficient (and safer) use of our road dollar. Another more surprising example is the difficulty that rail transport has in competing with long haul road freight, even though all the engineering calculations show that rail is far, far more efficient. Much of the reason is that road freight vehicles are effectively subsidised by passenger cars because their various taxes -- despite all their complaints -- are only a small fraction of the cost of the wear they cause to roads, whereas with passenger cars it is the other way around.
A truly fair road toll should therefore result in more frequent and faster buses, which are cleaner and more comfortable yet also cheaper; fewer passenger cars, yet with less congestion and better driving conditions when you really do need to use one; far fewer trucks; a lower road death toll and less pollution. This can be achieved, but it requires _more_ toll booths, not less, and much more discriminatory pricing by them. Which is possible without interfering with traffic flow, by the use of modern remote reading electronic toll booths.
One downside is that current electronic toll booths are a serious invasion of privacy. They really do allow "Big Brother" to track your (car's) every move. I for one would like to see much better assurances of privacy from the design of these systems.
The Garden State Parkway recently consolidated two $0.35 toll point into one $0.70 point. This allowed them to increase revenue without increasing tolls--by lowering operational costs.
While several short trips that don't touch the new single toll point don't even get charged, they probably factored that into the toll point consolidation.
There are unobvious hidden costs to tolls. There is a massive amount of energy wasted slowing an 80,000 pound semitrailer to throw $2 into a bucket, then re-accelerate to highway speed. This results in unnecessary exhaust fumes blowing into the air, a waste of fuel, plus also wear and tear on the truck.
The toll islands themselves are not free, nor are the employees that collect tolls and the police that must be on standby to catch noncompliant drivers. These add significantly to the cost of tolls to drivers even before the costs for the road itself are being paid for.
24x7 toll service is 168 toll-employee hours per week, per lane. If four lanes are open year round that is 245,280 employee work hours. Assuming a reasonable fully-employed wage of $20/hr including benefits, the tolls must collect $4,905,600 per year just to cover the staffing of those four toll lanes, or $3,360 per lane per day.
And this is efficiency?