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Old 12-11-2021, 06:06 AM
 
Location: New York Area
34,676 posts, read 16,717,009 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mike0421 View Post
If you live in a state with no tolls, how are you rated? Number 0? Number 1000?

I would have to drive in a straight line 12 hours before I could hope to encounter a toll booth.
Does that count overhead gantries?
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Old 12-11-2021, 07:52 AM
 
206 posts, read 115,556 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by camaro69 View Post
Don't tell the powers that be, that we're #11 in the country.

That'll p&ss them off and they'll raise the tolls again.

Are we just going to ignore the $20 tolls we have to cross a bridge or tunnel into NY?

Or the fact that other states have better alternatives to their toll roads? As another poster mentioned the turnpike is a must commuting to work from central NJ to North NJ unless you have 2+ extra hours to burn.
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Old 12-11-2021, 07:53 AM
 
Location: Elsewhere
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JERSEY MAN View Post
The people that get screwed are the ones that commute to north Jersey from south Jersey, for all the posters that say it doesn't affect them. Try taking a non toll road from, say Lacey Township, to the Lincoln Tunnel. There isn't much choice for other roads, so you're basically stuck using toll roads unless you want to drive about 4 or 5 hours one way.
Yes, of course they are going to be affected. I did at several points in life have to travel the Turnpike (or Parkway) for work, and from 2009, when I moved to Monmouth County, until 2020, when my mother in Bergen County died, I had to pay tolls every time I visited her. (I hated the traffic worse than the tolls, though, and told her she would never see me on a weekend in summer.)

It's a cost of commuting when one decides to take a job far from home. I did it, too, only I took a train. By the time I retired, it cost me nearly $500 a month to commute to work.
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Old 12-11-2021, 08:00 AM
 
Location: Elsewhere
88,263 posts, read 84,207,404 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Slunk View Post
Are we just going to ignore the $20 tolls we have to cross a bridge or tunnel into NY?
That's not a state toll, though.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Slunk View Post
Or the fact that other states have better alternatives to their toll roads? As another poster mentioned the turnpike is a must commuting to work from central NJ to North NJ unless you have 2+ extra hours to burn.
The alternatives to the toll roads are that it comes out of taxes. This way, the users pay the tolls, and since the NJ Turnpike is heavily used by truck traffic, particularly coming out of our container ship ports, they pay the highest tolls.

The trucks cause the biggest wear and tear on the Turnpike, and asphalt, concrete, and steel doesn't just heal itself. It would suck if NJ taxpayers had to be responsible for all the work that needs to be done.
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Old 12-11-2021, 09:37 AM
 
206 posts, read 115,556 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mightyqueen801 View Post
That's not a state toll, though.
Right. The port authority is somehow based off 2 states and their 2 governors and somehow manages to have very little public accountability with their business operations.

Along with their tolls, their salaries and pensions are quite high to say the least.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mightyqueen801 View Post
The alternatives to the toll roads are that it comes out of taxes. This way, the users pay the tolls, and since the NJ Turnpike is heavily used by truck traffic, particularly coming out of our container ship ports, they pay the highest tolls.

The trucks cause the biggest wear and tear on the Turnpike, and asphalt, concrete, and steel doesn't just heal itself. It would suck if NJ taxpayers had to be responsible for all the work that needs to be done.
This sounds reasonable in theory but punishing the daily commuter has become the reality. The tp toll has risen dramatically in recent years for passenger cars.
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Old 12-11-2021, 09:42 AM
 
9,434 posts, read 4,222,393 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Slunk View Post
Are we just going to ignore the $20 tolls we have to cross a bridge or tunnel into NY?

Or the fact that other states have better alternatives to their toll roads? As another poster mentioned the turnpike is a must commuting to work from central NJ to North NJ unless you have 2+ extra hours to burn.
I don’t think it’s $20, more like 12 or 13 depending on rush hour. But I don’t drive a bigger commercial truck, that may be the difference.
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Old 12-11-2021, 09:53 AM
 
19,064 posts, read 25,200,798 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by foodyum View Post
I don’t think it’s $20, more like 12 or 13 depending on rush hour.
The last time that I checked, the car toll at all of the Port Authority crossings is $13. Between that and the cost of parking in Manhattan, I use the PATH train on the rare occasions when I need to go to the city.
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Old 12-11-2021, 10:21 AM
 
50,415 posts, read 36,051,370 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mike0421 View Post
If you live in a state with no tolls, how are you rated? Number 0? Number 1000?

I would have to drive in a straight line 12 hours before I could hope to encounter a toll booth.
It doesn't rate states, it is simply a list of the most expensive toll ROADS in the country. The NJ Turnpike is #11 (15.5 cents per mile)
6 of them are in red states, if that makes difference to anyone, with the number one most expensive being the Chesapeake Expressway in Virginia, which costs $1.31 per mile.
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Old 12-11-2021, 10:26 AM
 
Location: Elsewhere
88,263 posts, read 84,207,404 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Slunk View Post
Right. The port authority is somehow based off 2 states and their 2 governors and somehow manages to have very little public accountability with their business operations.

Along with their tolls, their salaries and pensions are quite high to say the least.
Disclaimer: I am a retired PA employee. I made a decent-enough salary when I retired after more than 35 years, but I'm not rich and never was. The pension does cover my expenses and a little more, though.

It depends on your definition of "high". To someone who works at McDonald's, the salaries may seem big. Compared to similar positions in the private sector, they are not, but people often stay for the very good healthcare benefits, which are not as great now for newer employees as they were for those in past days, and the NY State pension, which has also changed for newer employees.

An example of this would be the Director of Aviation or the Chief Engineer positions. Every few years, the politicians who run the agency make a grand announcement that they are going to look on the outside for fresh blood to come in and take those positions. They spend big bucks on an executive search firm, and in the end, they promote the person, a long-time employee, who has been "acting" in the position during all this time, because no one in the private sector is going to take on a 24/7 job responsible for five airports or overseeing engineering and construction at all the PA facilities for less than half a million a year, plus a private-sector employee would get things like stock, etc., and other perks not available to public-sector employees. But the guy on the burger grill (exaggerated comparison deliberate, lol) sees a $250K salary and wonders what the person can possibly be doing to earn such a salary, because they don't have a clue as to what the job entails.

As for accountability, it's not as cut and dried as people like to auto-recite without really knowing anything. Of course there are auditors and public accountability. Every contract is on the website, as is every salary. There is a FOIA process to get actual documents released, within security parameters of course, since the PA is in the business of owning and operating terrorist targets. How do you think the media gets that information?

The problem is that you've got two worlds going on in the PA. It is "somehow" run by two states because Congress formed the PA by compact a hundred years ago to manage the difficulty of having major ports in two states with a shared harbor. Therefore, the heads of the Port Authority are the two governors, each of whom gets six Commissioners on the Board to do their bidding. Great if the two Govs are on the same page, not-so-great if they aren't. (By the way the Commissioners serve without salary, which I noticed some people seem to have trouble understanding. It's a power position.) The Commissioners officially approve all the expenditures at their monthly board meeting, which is live and open to the public, although they've been sent the details in advance and often come back with questions and requests for more justification.

Does money ever get wasted at the Port Authority? Yep, but not usually in ways YOU are ever going to hear about because it probably has to do with politics.

The second world is the staff, the people who keep the PA going and who have to try to do their jobs despite the politicians and their minions getting in the way. Is there deadwood in there? Sure, just as there is at McDonald's. People who skate by, who don't do their share, who steal, etc. That's everywhere, but it's the exception, not the rule, and we who did our jobs the right way are far angrier than you ever can be when some jerk does something illegal and makes the news, because then the public sits there and thinks that's the way things always are at the PA.

Part of my job was to analyze and negotiate proposals for professional services, including costs. I and my colleagues very literally saved the public millions of dollars over the years. My best negotiation was lowering a proposal on a $150+ million job by $14 million, far more than my salary and pension will ever be. Did you hear about that? No. But the guy who bumped up a contractor's change order in exchange for a new TV, you heard about THAT when he got caught, and then you automatically assumed that was business as usual for PA employees.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Slunk View Post
This sounds reasonable in theory but punishing the daily commuter has become the reality. The tp toll has risen dramatically in recent years for passenger cars.
Yes. One thing that's different about the NJTA from the PA is that the States are not allowed to use PA money for state work (except that Chris Christie got away with taking $3 billion from the PA to fix the Pulaski Skyway and somehow none of the lawyers who told him it was OK got punished for it, probably because the lawyers investigating it were the same people or buddies of same and they all have dirt on one another), and Turnpike Authority money can apparently be used for other state expenses. I see that they are giving $4 billion to NJ Transit.

And I can see how they would justify that--keep the trains running and you have fewer people on the roads, or so the theory would go.
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Old 12-11-2021, 10:39 AM
 
Location: Elsewhere
88,263 posts, read 84,207,404 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by foodyum View Post
I don’t think it’s $20, more like 12 or 13 depending on rush hour. But I don’t drive a bigger commercial truck, that may be the difference.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Retriever View Post
The last time that I checked, the car toll at all of the Port Authority crossings is $13. Between that and the cost of parking in Manhattan, I use the PATH train on the rare occasions when I need to go to the city.
I just looked. It's $16 if you pay cash, which some of the crossings (like the Goethals) don't even take anymore, or $13.75 peak/$11.75 off-peak,

One mistake people make when complaining about the tolls (it is a lot of money to cross a bridge or use a tunnel, no doubt) is that they seem to think that the toll money for the Holland Tunnel goes to fixing/maintaining the Holland Tunnel, etc.

That's not how it works. The Port Authority, like most public authorities that are not allowed to receive tax revenue, raises money for projects at its facilities by selling bonds. In order to make the bonds attractive to buyers, they have to prove that they will have the future revenue to pay the interest on those bonds.

The PA owns airports, which were traditionally the biggest revenue-producers in the agency, but not in the last couple of years for obvious reasons. LGA is being updated through public-private partnerships, but major work needs to be done at JFK and to a lesser extent, EWR. Teterboro, and Stewart also require money.

And of course the PATH system, which required major upgrades for years that were forced by Sandy to be done, runs at a huge loss.

The work still needs to be done. The bonds will be issued, but no one will buy them unless they know the interest will be paid, and so the PA has to show the money coming in from somewhere.

Is it fair to the person who needs to drive over the Staten Island Bridges but will never fly out of JFK? Nope, but life isn't fair and never has been. Unless you go off the grid and live in the woods somewhere, someone is always going to be paying for something that someone else will use.
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