Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - Most Toll Roads

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What state has the most toll roads? I recently got a job as a sales agent and will be travelling by car a lot. I am curious what state has the most tolls and possibly some good ways to avoid them?

John, either you're a stupid troll or a dumb jerk!

"Take" is probably correct, but just in case, then I ask you, John, "Why?" first- doesn't you company reimburse you toll charges? second- what's so terrible about toll roads? I have a choice of "free" and toll roads to take every day, and I'd still take the toll road if they charged 5 times as much, knowing that I'll not face local traffic & traffic signals. After all, my time is worth more than the tolls. Much more. Isn't yours as well?

Not only that most toll roads are better maintained than non-toll roads.

Illinois ranks right up there. Being from Wisconsin, we avoid it whenever possible for that reason and others (sorry, but I had to get in a little friendly rivalry). Indiana comes to mind as well. Also in Indiana, at least 7 years ago, if you made it too quickly from one toll booth to the next, they would get you for speeding. Sorry about this, but I must add that the highways (at least the ones we traveled) were in awful condition.

Toll roads suck. In Mass, for every $1 that toll roads bring in, $0.75 is spent wastefully and only $0.25 is spent on the roads for upkeep. Don't we already pay taxes to help pave the roads? Mass turnpike is NOT a public road. Toll roads only exsist to support a beauracracy of pencil pushers. Tolls create artificial traffic jams. In Mass we're spending $19 Billion on the "Big Dig" to help ease traffic. Meanwhile we create equal traffic jams at the toll booths creating smog, inefficiency, and a much worse quality of life for those that have to drive on them. I understand that in California there are "privately" owned toll roads, something that I would be fond of. It's the governments focus on creating beauracracy and inefficiency that makes me steaming mad.

New Jersey, Deleware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia. Ever picked up a map?

Toll roads here in the U.S. are waaaay less expensive than the ones in Europe. When I was in Italy and France I was shocked by the expense of driving on them.

Toll roads are only in existance to add an additional tax that allows employment for the 1000s of people who work for the toll roads. The tolls do not keep the roads better, they merely allow several thousand employees to have cushy jobs. Any way that the gov't can take and keep your money and have gov't jobs instead of private industry jobs is something to watch out for.

Okay, like overpaid NJ state employees?

The most miles of toll roads, do you mean? New York, NJ, Penn, and Florida. This is a silly question...won't your company reimburse you for tolls?

so are you not going to sale in states that have toll roads? is 75 cents too much for you?

Something I did not realize until fairly recently is that most toll roads were built before the interstate system, especially those in the northeast (PennaPike, MassPike, NY State Thruway). At the time, there was no government subsidy set up for building major access-linited roads. So, in order to finance them, the states had to charge money, with the belief being that when the road building was paid off, the tolls would stop (yes yes, how "far-sighted" of them). Once the interstate era began, states were NOT ALLOWED to charge tolls on roads that were partially (90%) paid for by the federal government. (This partiallyt explains why no interchange exists between I-95 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike). The funny thing is that when FDR first had the idea of an interstate road system, it was expected that it would be paid with tolls (all across the US). By the time it came to being, in Eisenhower's era, the belief was that it should be funded by taxes rather than tolls. Recently, as it has been harder to get funding for roads, more toll roads are popping up (Orange County Toll Roads, Dulles Greenway, Hwy 407 in Toronto), with many owned and operated by private companies. So, in general, the toll roads were not set up as "government bureaucratic" systems, but as necessary systems for the funding of these early roads projects. And the newer ones are often built as toll roads to save the taxpayers money (at least that's the political spin). Of course, this doesn't explain everything (as George Carlin once said, You can't back out of your driveway in New Jersey without some idiot in a hat wanting fifty cents) Here's a Toll Roads website: http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~mn2n/tollroads.html