( Toll booths-2 (Blogfa - by Zizilak

In Canada there are very few toll roads. only one in Ontario. .The federal or provincial governments usually make the money they need to maintain the roads from taxes imposed on the price of gas. The more you drive, the more tax you pay for that. Therefore they don’t need to produce toll roads. The one toll road in Ontario is primarily designed to give people the option of paying more to get to downtown Toronto faster in rush hours. There are no toll booths in that road. Everything is automated. A camera takes a picture of your license when you enter and exit the road and they send a bill to your address. That is that easy.

This holidays, (and many times before) we had the pleasure of driving in many different states in US. All of these states have their own toll roads and toll booths. If you are driving in an interstate highway, say I90, you end up stopping at ten or a dozen toll booths. The mentality here is that people hate paying taxes. They think if they contribute more money to the society, that means that they have a socialist government, usually (for them) equivalent to communism. This has many consequence, for example health care is much more expensive here, than many other rich industrial nations. People usually don’t have proper pension, when they are really old, and yes they have hundreds and hundreds of toll booths to help pay for the maintenance of the highways. What drives me crazy is not only the fact that you have to carry cash all the time (something that I rarely would consider in Canada because you can pay everything by credit or debit cards) but also that the road conditions s are still much worse than the roads in Canada.

The worst experience I had was in the state of Illinois, where you would expect having a prosperous city like Chicago, they must be rich. And still I felt we are damaging our car by driving it in speed limit (more than 120 K/min) in the most major highway, with humongous potholes every 100 meters or so. Yet we paid much more tolls in that state than the neighboring Indiana, whit much better road conditions in the same highway.

I totally don’t understand this situation. We were stopped every 20-30 kilometers to pay tolls, even at checkpoints that there were no exits between them. They could simply make you pay twice as much in one of them, and pay less for staffing one of them (of course it can’t even be automatic!) Sometimes you fill like this is just to help produce jobs for old retired people who don’t have a proper pension in the first place and can’t afford to just stay at home and enjoy their retirement. What is wrong with paying more tax and enjoying the help of the government for the less fortunate?