Not Toll Bridges, But Troll Bridges

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Not Toll Bridges, but Troll Bridges

“In yon strait path a thousand
May well be stopped by three.
Now who will stand on either hand,
And keep the bridge with me?”

- from Stanza XXIX, Horatius

Many electrons have been sacrificed in the babblesphere regarding whether or not the governor of New Jersey, who is three or four or five times the man you’ll ever be, went all conehead and shut down multiple lanes on the George Washington Bridge in order to punish an uppity Democrat by annoying and even endangering thousands of people.

Better than finding a severed horse-head in one’s bed, though.

Compounding the chaos is the fact that the George Washington Bridge is a toll bridge. The driver’s freedom of movement is not free; one-way passage is $13.

But here is a question no one has asked: why does the George Washington Bridge require a toll? It’s 80 or so years old; isn’t it paid for by now?

And here’s a better question – why are there tolls on bridges and roads at all?

Several government entities in Texas charge drivers for freedom of movement along certain roads and across certain bridges. Up to a point, this practice might enjoy some limited defense – any bridge is a very difficult engineering challenge because it is a structure that must carry traffic across the instability of water or air. Sinking a bridge pier is a matter of finding a stable platform beneath both water and sediment, and once it is in place the pier and its footing must withstand incredible pressures and currents that are constantly shifting. If there is no footing, then a suspension system is required, which is a complex way of requiring a bridge to support itself. It’s all like, you know, physics and stuff, which I didn’t pay attention to in high school. Gordon Gaskin and I dumped a road-kill possum on the physic teacher’s front porch one night, though, and that was fun.

Good Socialist wishes and Disney fairies don’t make a bridge happen; from concept to the last paint stripe, building a bridge requires the work of lots of smart, tough, energetic people. And smart, tough, energetic people who build bridges are worthy of their hire. Thus, charging a toll until the bridge is paid for might be reasonable.

But then, drivers also pay for the bridge through fuel taxes and a specific sub-category on their yearly car registration. A Texas driver crossing a Texas toll bridge pays for the bridge three times over. When one considers the extra levies on commercial vehicles, Texas drivers are paying, through the higher costs of goods, for the toll bridge four times over.

So where does one go to see the budget for a given toll bridge or toll highway?

And then there is the matter of freedom, the freedom to go and come as one chooses. Why should a Texan, who pays any number of taxes to fund a bridge before he (the pronoun is gender-neutral) even gets to it, be stopped by a functionary and, sanctioned by the laws of Texas, be required to pay off that functionary in order to cross that bridge?

The matter of the bribes…um…payoffs…um…tolls is even more subject to questions of, well, questionable behavior when one learns that some of the controlling agencies are private companies.

Cintra (a vague, fuzzy, harmless-sounding name) owns the make-him-an-offer-he-can’t-refuse control over a portion of Interstate 35 in Fort Worth. Cintra is a Spanish company. Thus, not only does a private company demand a payoff for you to drive along a public road you’ve already paid for, this private company is not even an American company.

Even for a slow thinker like y’re ‘umble scrivener, that doesn’t sound right on multiple levels of not sounding right.

http://www.texashighwayman.com/texhwys.shtml

http://www.examiner.com/article/texans-call-for-boycott-of-first-foreign-owned-toll-road

http://www.nbcdfw.com/traffic/stories/Spanish-Company-Signs-50-Year-For-Profit-Toll-Road-Deal-173618611.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/us/texas-road-tolls-proliferate-as-public-financing-dwindles.html?_r=0

http://tollfreenc.org/news-info/national-toll-information/

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