How do you use tax dollars to make life easier for the rich—and harder for the middle class and poor? Easy. In California you use tax dollars to build toll roads on crowded freeways. In this way the rich can get to work or play easy and quick—while the poor are in standstill gridlock on the freeways hoping their care will not overheat or they run out of expensive gas while idling on a freeway. This is another government scam run by the Democrats for their friends, the donor class.
“The toll lanes and toll roads these folks consistently favor and drill into the students who will eventually become city, county and state traffic planners, have yet to eliminate a single traffic jam. They also are one of the great governmental bait-and-switches of all time.
Everyone paid for this state’s freeways via the gasoline tax, highest in the lower 48 states. Everyone expected to enjoy equal access to their land and lanes.
But toll lanes common on freeways in the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California and soon — if planners have their way — in places like Fresno and San Diego plainly favor the rich.
Newson wants you to pay for his friends to get a quick ride—and you to fume over the inequity of it all. Another reason to flee California.
Freeway toll lane bait-and-switch expands in California
Tom Elias, California Focus, 7/29/22
Traffic rules and traffic jams act as one of the few true equalizers in American life. The rules cover everyone equally, drivers of 1993 Honda Civics facing the same speed limits, red lights and delays as people driving the newest Cadillacs and Lamborghinis.
But the movement to make things unequal on California’s urban highways, to favor the rich over the poor, grows steadily, always pushed by the well-meaning denizens of university planning departments.
The toll lanes and toll roads these folks consistently favor and drill into the students who will eventually become city, county and state traffic planners, have yet to eliminate a single traffic jam. They also are one of the great governmental bait-and-switches of all time.
Everyone paid for this state’s freeways via the gasoline tax, highest in the lower 48 states. Everyone expected to enjoy equal access to their land and lanes.
But toll lanes common on freeways in the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California and soon — if planners have their way — in places like Fresno and San Diego plainly favor the rich.
Tolls are often charged by the mile, with people paying to enjoy the same privileges when alone in their vehicles that are usually provided by carpool lanes. Only a few of those were added to the original freeways — and not merely appropriated from existing lanes — because of public protests over the bait-and-switch. Tolls are higher in peak hours when people have the most need to drive. Who hasn’t endured traffic jams while watching the privileged whiz by in converted toll lanes that once were available to all?
It’s yet another failed tactic pushed by utopian planners. Remember, these are the same folks who claimed slowdowns and stoppages would be mitigated by metering freeway onramps so that only one car at a time can enter traffic lanes. Anyone who has driven the I-405 freeway in Los Angeles or the I-80 near the eastern approaches to the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge knows that does not ease traffic loads.
But failure and unfairness do not stop the university departments that create traffic policy. A new study from UCLA’s influential transportation institute once again claims that “congestion pricing” — charging more to use freeways at peak hours — is “the gold standard policy for managing traffic.”
This time, though, the traffic “experts” concede their favored practice is unfair on its face, excluding those who can’t afford high tolls from the fast lanes, and consigning them to traffic jams on freeways like I-880 and I-110, to name just two.
