Trucks cause more wear and tear, not all people use highways either who purchase gas

Gas tax wouldn’t solve congestion on a specific piece of the road. Also, there is no need for toll plazas with the new high speed camera setups. They’re not even really new, Canada has had them for decade(s).

You don't have to put a toll gate and slow everyone down to 15mph to collect a toll. Open-road tolling, such as in the Chicago region, can easily read a transponder (or a license plate) at 70mph. Some places have gone so far as to move to all-electronic tolling, with no toll booths (e.g., Mass turnpike).

Many more crossings in the NY metro area are now open-tolled for both EZPass and toll-by-mail: Whitestone, Throgs Neck, Tappan Zee

Yep, the tolling in the Seattle area works similarly - no booths, just profit, even if you're hauling ass at 85mph

All-to-real scenario: you pay $X in gas taxes and use Road XYZ every day. Unfortunately, Road XYZ is constantly jammed and full of pot holes because all the gas tax cash is funding an extremely under-used fancy new highway connecting Nowheresville, USA to SlightlyLessNowheresville, USA. Why? Because the general assemblymen from Nowheresville and SlightlyLessNowheresville are senior members of the transportation committee.

> I always wondered why public roads would opt for awful toll plaza back-ups over increasing the gas tax.

Open-road tolling with a combination of transceivers and a "pay online later" solves this problem. Toll plazas (and the people who work them) are entirely unnecessary.

It's not really an issue these days. In this area, EZ-Pass is pushed hard, and makes toll plazas a non-issue for the most part. There is very little need to slow down as most can just capture your license plate number and charge you that way, making the entire experience easy. This ensures that the roads that actually get used get the money from people using them, something that doesn't happen with a gas tax.

>In this area, EZ-Pass is pushed hard

Because it has the side benefit of being an easier/cheaper way to track people than license plate cameras. They could just do pay by plate and give people a paperless discount if they only wanted to save money. I bet EZpass gets a cut too so that adds yet another dimension to it.

>There is very little need to slow down

Yet morons still feel the need to do so creating the same traffic jams that high speed tolling was supposed to solve...

>This ensures that the roads that actually get used get the money from people using them

This is what they said about I90 in MA "the tolls will just stick around long enough to pay for the cost of construction." The it was "it'll only be used to pay for maintenance". Famous last words. We all know how that turned out, just another revenue stream it's impossible to take away or account for the use of.

> Because it has the side benefit of being an easier/cheaper way to track people than license plate cameras. They could just do pay by plate and give people a paperless discount if they only wanted to save money. I bet EZpass gets a cut too so that adds yet another dimension to it.

A lot of the E-ZPass system is about the simplification of the back-office processing. When you get a transponder, you have an account set up to do the debiting and also identify your current mailing address. License plate recognition, by contrast, requires getting details from different databases, and the mapping to the vehicle owner is less robust. It really is easier for the toll providers if they use a transponder system than it is to do license plate recognition.

Also, E-ZPass is an interagency consortium, not a company. It's actually largely run by the Port Authority of NY and NJ. The only fee that appears to be collected is a one-time $10 to use the trademark.

>Yet morons still feel the need to do so creating the same traffic jams that high speed tolling was supposed to solve...

In Chicagoland, everybody seems to have no issue ripping through toll gates at 75-80 miles per hour. I assure you we are no smarter than anywhere else.