This past Saturday night, I got to observe first hand one way in which the privatized Toll Road is attempting to save money – fewer employees at toll booths. On I-80/90, headed eastbound at the Ohio gate at about 11:00 p.m. on a Saturday night, I waited approximately 5 minutes to pay. It’s not like I had a free market decision I could make. I was stuck, and I got charged the same no matter how long I waited. Five minutes every year or two is a small indignity for me. But, to some extent, it puts the lie to the idea that the Toll Road is going to turn a profit through some kind of business magic. Instead, the new owners will just provide crappy service to its captive consumers — consumers who used to be citizens.
That would be considered a short wait at the Westgate toll plaza in Portage. And when they were switching the Hammond toll plaza over to accept I-Zoom earlier this summer there were five mile backups to pay. I’m not sure how this will all work out when they get all the plazas to accept I-Zoom (and other state electronic paying devices-personally I have Illinios’ I-Pass) but I am not holding my breath on this one!
I just saw a sign on State Road 23 in Granger (right before the toll road entrance) saying that the Capital Avenue extension (which has been under construction for many years) is being financed by Major Moves money! Since when?
Two questions:
1. How does the 5-minute wait compare with the pre-lease days?
2. Was there truly no other road that could have been taken? That would define ‘captive audience’.
In that first case, it would be interesting note what changes have taken place. Are there fewer booths being staffed now?
I never noticed more than a minute’s wait in the pre-lease days, particularly at such a low volume hour of the day. But, that’s purely anecdotal. I don’t travel the road enough to have anything like a statistically relevant sample.
The captivity comes from the fact that I didn’t have (and don’t think I could get) the relevant information before making my decision — i.e. there was no way for me to know the wait time at the exit booth before deciding whether to take I-80/90 or taking another route, perhaps US 20. (Though, keep in mind that the contract with the toll road’s owner prohibits improvement of US 20 beyond a certain level.)
But, Doug, information asymmetry is what makes the free market great.
C’mon, how’s a fella supposed to make a buck? Actually providing goods of superior quality or at a lower cost takes so much more work than trafficking in the ignorance of consumers.
Vote Libertarian!
Two words. Exact change.
Seriously, I’m just glad I don’t have to test out the toll road privatization results myself.
Me? I’m waiting for the wondrous I-69 extension.
Yeah, worse than the exact change is the person who decides to ask the toll booth person for hotel directions (and I mean DETAILED directions), etc…and worse than that are the people who get in the exact change lane and realize they don’t have exact change and then they’re trying to back up and get in a cash lane…and, well you can tell I live close to the Toll Road.
My favorite right now is the Illinios toll system. They have the I-Pass system where you can blow past a sensor at…well…really fast (my mom might be reading this). They automatifcally take out the $0.40. And when your account gets below $10 they automatically recharge it with your credit card.
I travel the toll road fairly regularly and it’s no longer a wait now than when it was pre-lease. For heavens sake Doug, it was a holiday weekend to boot. You can only squeeze so many vehicles through so many boothes. Even opening up another booth doesn’t speed things up for quite a while.
11 at night in Angola? Traffic was pretty light up until the toll gate.
I’ll freely admit that this could’ve been a fluke. I certainly don’t have any evidence to prove otherwise.
But, let’s go at it this way — what do the Toll Road operators lose by making me wait? They save money by not paying toll booth operators.
If you were going east, we’re the last exit in Indiana at Angola/I-69. The booth you got backed up at was the end of the toll road at the border where ALL travelers exit and NOBODY has correct change, and the traffic ain’t from Angola it’s from everywhere west of Ohio. That booth and the one on the opposite end of the state are and have ALWAYS been backed up as long as I can remember. 80% of the traffic on the toll road goes all the way through the state, so you have far more cars going through those two locations than any of the exits in between. It’s a bottleneck that has always been more prevalent than not.
But at least you got a chance to poke a stick in Mitch’s eye, that was the point wasn’t it?
If it’s always been a bottleneck, why were half of the booths closed?
There’s been talk about moving the western gate into La Porte county (about 20 miles to the east of it’s current point). Thought is that would remove the Chesterton/Valpo to Chicago commuter traffic from that bottleneck.
Don’t complain too loudly, Doug. In Toronto on the 407 thy have no toll booths. However about three months later I received a bill in the mail. They had taken a picture of my license plate. Not only did I get charged the normal toll for the road; but I was also charged $1.50 for each picture of my license plate! BTW the same company that owns the 407 owns our Toll Road.
Nice, Branden. Excellent to take a situation where flawed competition is the best possible scenario and use it as a blanket for condemning the free market.
Roadways aren’t like producing cookies, where there are relatively few barriers to market entry. With roadways, there are few possible alternatives, and you know it.
What the hell, though, right? It allows you to make the jab you wish to make.
The Toronto 407 was another one of those privatization deals, right?
Per Wikipedia:
Rev AJB makes an interesting point above about receiving bills in the mail from tollway use in Canada. In European countries ,you may get an autoroute speeding citation several weeks after the fact,stating where the radar caught you, time of day and kilometer marker.I’m waiting for that system to take effect here in the states.State police then could be assigned more challenging tasks.
Doug, They have NEVER had ALL booths open at any time, since the toll road was built. (as I said I travel it frequently) Like any business (even when the state ran it) you don’t have a full staff hanging around on the clock in the hopes you will need them. The bottleneck you were caught in dispersed in a matter of minutes. Granted, that’s 5 minutes of your life you’ll never get back, but in the grand scheme of things it’s still only 5 minutes.
Hard as the lease detractors try, to find a way to slam the consortium or the gov, it is no less efficient now than it ever was.
just sour grapes