Toll Roads are a great con!

Toll roads are ubiquitous!

Not only are they becoming the default type of road system, but I foresee a time when governments start building them between cities as well.

Toll roads are usually built by companies at the behest of governments (usually State) to supply a badly needed missing transit corridor between two parts of a city, or to alleviate traffic congestion in one part of an overcrowded cit.

State governments love them because they can claim to be doing something about the problem (relieving congestion and improving traffic flow) and it doesn't cost them a cent. The company puts up its own money, designs and then builds the road and, in return, gets the right to charge a toll on cars using it for the next twenty or thirty years.

The problem with Toll Roads is that they are not the solution to the problem of traffic congestion. They are in fact the solution to a completely different problem, namely, how do you funnel groups of people from different ares into one single location where you can gouge money out of them.

The requirements of this second solution is to restrict where people can get on or off until such time as you have managed to collect the toll off them. More than one collection point costs money, so cars are funnelled along a channel of roads unable to get on or off where they'd like.

The same thing applies when you replace toll booths with E-Tags. They cost as much money as a set of boom gates, so you only want the minimum set required. This means you still restrict where people can get on or off the toll road until they have passed the collection point.

The net effect is you replace a public road with a congestion problem that has lots of entry and exist points with a privately owned road that you have to pay to use and has very very few exit points (none of them near where you want to exit).