I live in the Bay Area and hate HOV lanes. I can look over and see that more than half of the drivers are in violation, and yet it is effectively unenforced. It is a system that punishes people willing to follow the rules.

Asking someone to waste maybe up to an hour of their life everyday to sit there and watch people willing to break the rules speed by and get to be home early with their families breeds massive resentment, and anger. It encourages people to abandon all sorts of social contracts.

I don’t have an issue with HOT lanes, but I’m not a big fan of the toll roads in Texas.

I don’t like that it creates separate classes of infrastructure for citizens based on their ability to pay. Even the non-toll highways had an HOT-like lane you paid per-use to drive on that was often significantly faster than the free lanes.

It makes a system where I suspect many people won’t want to pay to upgrade the free infrastructure because they don’t use it, and people who can’t afford the daily tolls waste even more time in traffic. The fast pass lane are even worse because they cannibalize lanes that could be used to alleviate general traffic (and were typically sparsely used).

The tolls were substantial for some people. $3-$8 a day on toll roads (ie no fast pass lane). At $8 a day, that’d be $40 a week, ~$160/month. That’s nearly 20% of the weekly pre-tax income of someone making Austin’s $22/hr minimum wage.

Houston would be unlivable without toll roads in 2025. The medical center would collapse overnight. The SH288 toll has probably indirectly saved more lives than any other toll project in the state. Medical professionals can reliably get between their suburban homes and their patients in ~constant time now.

It's maybe not "fair" that some people can use this option indiscriminately every day, but at least it is an option that everyone has access to. There's no physical barrier stopping you from using the Texas toll roads if you really needed to in an emergency. All that will happen is a bill will appear in your mailbox about 30 days later. If you choose to not pay it, the chances something bad will happen are approximately zero.

In NYC it's the police that have been obfuscating their plate number for a long time, not just poor people. https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/04/19/if-nypd-is-cracking-d...

HOV lanes in the bay area are terrible. We pay to build these lanes and then the government makes us pay to use them? Seems terribly unfair. Its also unfair to make the poorer people spend more of their time commuting than the wealthy.

I dislike them not so much in my home area but everywhere else where I have no idea what I'm doing and worry that I'm going to come home to a ton of envelopes full of enormous fines. This is made worse as cash payment disappears.

Tolls are a regressive tax; they disproportionately affect the poor.

Here in Norway we have funded the vast majority of new highways and similar by turing them into toll roads. The government might chip in but some fraction is covered by toll.

An issue is that it's set up as a regular loan, which the collected toll repays. So over the lifetime of the loan, often more than half is interest. Add administration costs and in some cases the actual money spent on the road is a small fraction of the total toll paid.

That said, in principle I think it's fair to have some use-based pricing. Same goes for public transportation. Studies have shown it's not ideal to have free public transportation, but rather a low fare.

They are no longer HOV lanes. They are toll lanes with a minor HOV discount beard.

> or which have license plate covers is unacceptable because the poor do this most frequently

There's a YT channel where a guy exposes these. He found that one of the most common group of offenders in NYC was ... cops and their personal vehicles.

These are not commonly called slip roads in Texas - the term is feeder road. Most feeder roads in the metro areas are lined with business or multifamily residential frontage.

> you can take the slip roads almost everywhere but they’re slow.

We have that problem here in Germany. The roads aren't just slow - the people living in the towns these roads run through are going through hell because they are affected massively. Can't safely cross the road, emergency response vehicles take ages, an insane amount of noise and emissions (because vehicles near idle make much more toxic exhaust when at low load and thus temperature), more brake and tire dust... Austria was fed up years ago, Bavaria recently followed suit [1].

[1] https://www.adac.de/der-adac/regionalclubs/suedbayern/news/a...

Anything the poor do more frequently should be punished more severely.

Toll roads are corrosive to the American spirit. They are low-trust, f-u-i-got-mine, and they breed resentment both between economic classes and between people who follow the rules and people who don't care about them. They are the HOA of traffic management schemes.

Toll roads are the worst. The fact that there are increasing numbers of them is as much a bellwether of the death of the American experiment experiment as anything else.

> Overall, I think fare at point of use is a great structure. In the past we couldn’t enforce it but now we can do this for more things.

I don't agree. Price "discrimination" for government services is not acceptable. The perverse incentives that sets up are far too strong and the profits too juicy to avoid corruption.

We have historical analogs (paying for fire service and the corruption that caused in Rome). We have modern analogs (money from marijuana funding police forces that then arrest marijuana offenders and fight legalization efforts).

Letting price discrimination enter government services is simply a road to corruption and disaster.

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