Some More News - SMN: Toll Roads Are Mostly A Private Profit Scam

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

Hi. Here's everything you didn't know you needed to know about toll roads – where the money goes, how it's an inefficient way to fund infrastructure, and how private companies take advantage of sweet government contracts to take your money. Go to https://ground.news/SMN to stay fully informed . Subscribe through our link for as little as $1 a month or get 30% off unlimited access this month only. Right now, Nuts.com is offering new customers a free gift with purchase and free shipping on orders of $29 or more at https://Nuts.com/morenews.  Give your business the gift of https://stamps.com so your mailing and shipping is covered this holiday season. Sign up with promo code MORENEWS for a special offer that includes a 4-week trial, plus free postage, and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to https://stamps.com, click the microp hone at the top of the page, and enter code MORENEWS. Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DdG7RE2YiWwIx44F191hyyYMbpFbH8f2ycL93CZLJS8/edit?usp=sharing  Check out our MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews   SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh  Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here-- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229   Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA   Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/   TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews  

Hey there news folks. Are you ready for your slop? Your news folks slop, which is, it's news in this analogy. The slop is news. Also, slop. You know what? The point is, neither is technically edible, but you can still eat them.

You can butt chug Newsweek. I won't stop you. Heck, I'll hold the funnel and I'll host a funeral. And speaking of putting stuff in your butts, the holidays are coming up, or rather, are already here. Perhaps you've recently traveled via automobile and or aeroplane to eat green bean casserole, another type of slop, and break wishbone after wishbone

after wishbone after wishbone after wishbone after wishbone after wishbone. So many wishbones shattered under your holiday boots. Togetherness, travel, butt stuff, et cetera. The point here is that you may have even driven a great distance, and during that journey, we're forced to stop at a little booth where a robot or disheartened human

with the soul of a robot asked for money so you can keep driving. It's something we accept as a general irritation of existing in a functioning society. You gotta pay a toll or two, the same way parking costs money and your boss will steal and sell your blood. That's just life.

Hey, whoa, actually wait. Actually, counterpoint. Toll roads are pretty darn bad. Interesting. Don't we lefty simps love taxes? Perhaps I'm not like other girls. Or perhaps the more I talk, the less you'll like toll roads, a thing you already don't like.

Perhaps you've noticed more of them lately though. That's weird. Of course, toll roads are far from a new concept. Records of collecting tolls date all the way back to the ancient world, between the seventh and third centuries BCE. It's a pretty basic idea. Collect a small fee from travelers

to cover the cost of repairs and maintenance, and to pay for the construction of more roads. It's a method of funding infrastructure, but not a terribly efficient one. Sort of like how you can't depend on nacho sales alone to build a new AMC, or how I'm not legally allowed to charge people admission to use the nacho machine in my garage

because I don't have a license. Well, what the fucking nacho machine license, Terry? Terry works for the city. Tolls were used to fund the bridge construction and upkeep in the middle ages because everyone in medieval times went ape turd for bridges, just absolutely rabid over them.

I guess they were all too good to ride their horses at sea level. Medieval jerks, dry river crossing pervs. I'm glad they're dead. Meanwhile, in America, the first turnpike was built in the 18th century. Turnpikes are a specific type of expressway that charges riders a toll,

and turnpike trusts were some of the first organizations in the country that were authorized to collect those tolls in order to pay for road improvements, like cooler billboards, billboards that do back flips. Oh, billboards that do magic. No, that's impractical. Impractical magic starring Sandra Bullock? No, that's nonsense,

and not even a reference many people will get. By the early 20th century, automobiles had become so common that the country needed a way to build and maintain paved roads instead of the stick and bramble ones that shatter horse ankles and leave Model Ts hopelessly stranded in bore country. So in 1916, the government passed the Federal Aid Road Act,

which was the first piece of legislation to create federal funding for any public road over which mail was delivered. That's most of them, most of the roads. The act further stipulated that any road built using those funds had to remain toll free, which if you remember is most of them. After that came the Federal Highway Act of 1921,

which added more toll to bridges, tunnels, and highways to the country, and the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which created federal funding for the interstate system. The Federal Aid Highway Act also established a highway trust fund to be primarily funded by gas and diesel taxes. That's the money that's supposed to cover the cost of highway construction and maintenance. Remember that bit, because we're going to come back to it later. We're planting seeds like the first season of Lost. Except our seeds will go somewhere.

Get fucked, Tidal Monkey! You probably barely paid attention. They answered everything they needed to. Anyway, in 1991, just 13 years before the airing of the perfect pilot episode of the flawed, but hit and still pretty good television series Lost, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act allowed for the tolling of public roads

as long as they weren't interstate roads, even though they'd been built with federal funding. And the act further stipulated that preexisting roads and tunnels could be tolled provided some level of reconstruction or replacement took place. In other words, it incentivized states to create new road construction projects that could generate plenty of toll revenue and to make better roads.

But mostly, mostly it seems like it was just that first thing I said. Private public partnerships and tolling first emerged in the 1990s. From the mid 90s to the mid aughts, these private public tolling first emerged in the 1990s. From the mid-90s to the mid-aughts, these private public tolling partnerships invested $21 billion in 43 toll facilities across the country.

That's a whole lot of money. That's half the cost of one Twitter. That amount of money will spoil your dinner unless you butt-chug it. No, there's no time! The pandemic, and more specifically, the lockdown period of the pandemic, highlighted just how dependent we are on toll roads

to maintain our roadways. During the period in which nobody was driving because we were all at home getting day drunk on White Claw and watching the Great British Bake Off, they lost an estimated $9 billion in revenue. That's a lot of money. That's half of half the cost of one Twitter. Not X mind you, but Twitter specifically.

X is worth so much less. So not only are tolls an extremely inefficient way to collect revenue, like funding your movie theater exclusively on nacho sales, but it's also extremely vulnerable to external factors, like when I forgot to lock my nacho garage. It's especially vulnerable when it's ostensibly the only option we have to fund our infrastructure,

which it is. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! You're probably saying like that. Don't I already pay taxes? Shouldn't some of that money be used to maintain the roads we all drive on? And you'd think the answer would be yes, but not enough of it for some reason.

It's dumb, which also makes it really confusing because it's really dumb. So let me try to break it down in words that even a simple puppet could understand, but won't because he's not in this episode. But first, we're gonna cut to ads. Festive ads? Oh, probably just regular ads. What's up, bro?

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this site is that it breaks down how many sources discussed the story, 29, what the bias breakdown is, in this case it's pretty evenly distributed with the majority coming from the center, and it even shows all the article headlines in one place so you can compare and see distinctions between coverage. The left's coverage emphasized the severity of the radioactivity, the center's coverage mentioned the dangers of future contaminations and dangers of possible food safety issues, and the rights coverage mentioned how this leads to decreased hunting. Interestingly, the rights coverage is the only one that mentioned the source of the original study from the Vienna University of Technology. Now, another much less important

example that is upsettingly not about Boers is this news about the New Hampshire Trump rally, where depending on which of the 62 accumulated articles you read, he either praised dictators and called his political enemies, i.e. more than half of the population vermin, or he urged unity for his party and had a massive overflow line. Each detail is technically true,

but it's interesting to see the emphasis laid out for you, isn't it? Not a huge surprise about the rights coverage, but it's also interesting to note that while the left's coverage emphasized Trump's false claims of election fraud and his portrayal of himself as a victim, Trump's plans to investigate and prosecute his critics

and potentially deploy the military, and quotes from historians who compare Trump's language to that of dictators, the center's coverage did not do that. In fact, Newsweek's headline emphasized the dictator comparisons as coming from Joe Scarborough. Maybe do a little more digging there, Newsweek. Starting to sound a little more right wing

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I wonder why. Point is, we actually reached out to Ground News as a sponsor. We get a lot of ad offers here. You've seen us do them, but this was a thing that we specifically liked and wanted to tell you about. News and the media landscape gets muddier all the time, and this is a great way to get a larger,

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So go check out all of the delicious options at Nuts.com slash more news. You'll receive a free gift and free shipping when you spend $29 or more. That's nuts.com slash more news. We're back from the festive ads. They were kind of festive in that I was drunk when I shot the ads. So we went through the history of toll roads in America. Now it's time to talk about how they work. There are essentially two types of toll roads in the United States of America. Now it's time to talk about how they work. There are essentially two types of toll roads in the United States of America. Build, operate, transfer, or bot contracts and public authority. Bot contracts allow a private company to finance and build the project, be it a road, bridge, tunnel, or Mechagodzilla, and then operate the project for a set period of time,

usually 20 to 30 years, to recoup its investment. At the end of that period, control of the road, bridge, tunnel, or Mechagodzilla transfers back to the government. Public authority toll roads are owned and operated by the government, using the revenue to finance the construction and operation of toll collection facilities,

road maintenance, snow removal, chips, and so on. For example, tolls collected on the New Jersey Turnpike go towards funding all that stuff because the Turnpike is a toll road controlled by the state of New Jersey. It'd be weird if it were controlled by like Arizona. Zonagate, what a scandal! Now, you probably remember me talking about

the Federal Road Aid Act and the Federal Highway Aid Act earlier, which created federal funding programs for the nation's roadways and stipulated how those funds could be used. They also stipulated that roads built using this money cannot have tolls on them, unless some improvements are made, of course.

You also may remember that those programs are financed by gasoline taxes, but the federal gas tax hasn't increased since 1993, the year Jurassic Park came out, leaving the Highway Trust Fund drier than a fossil in Dr. Grant's bone trailer. It's also where he keeps his dinosaur bones. Despite the fact that literally every other aspect

of living has grown exponentially more expensive since the 90s, the federal gas tax hasn't increased one iota. Apparently we're supposed to pave our roads with wishes, which is cool in a no it's not sort of way. Hey, remember all those bridges that keep collapsing? I'm sure that'll stop if we just squeeze our eyes shut really tight and hope. Whoops.

No, wait. No, that's how you shit. That's how people shit. Speaking of shit, the Biden administration used only $110 billion of its more than $1 trillion infrastructure package to repair 69,000 miles of roadway and 4,600 bridges. But most of that money is still supposed to come from taxes on gas and diesel fuel.

But like I just mentioned, the federal gas tax hasn't increased in over a quarter century. So Biden's infrastructure package is only postponing the funds insolvency until 2027. Not to mention that the spending levels authorized by the package are projected to actually widen the funding gap to a projected shortfall

of $215 billion by 2031, which is a bigger loss than what was originally projected before the infrastructure bill was passed. So, you know, fucking whoops, I guess. So why hasn't the federal gas tax gone up to keep pace with inflating costs? Because every presidential candidate of the past half century would rather lock themselves

in a jigsaw trap than suggest raising the price of gas, even though that money is supposed to be used for our collective benefit. Real heavy air quotes on the phrase supposed to be used, just real lumpy sacks of ironic punctuation hanging over all those words that deserve to be true. Also, gas taxes are not terribly efficient, both for all the reasons we've just mentioned,

and additionally because a gas tax doesn't differentiate between vehicles that might cause more or less wear on roadways while using the same amount of fuel. So how do you close that gap in funding? By increasing state gas taxes, which many states have done, and of course with bought toll roads, the ones maintained and operated by private companies. Several states have turned to the bought structure to fund a massive increase in toll roads

over the last decade, as federal funding has steadily grown more insufficient. Privatized toll roads are popular among lawmakers because it takes the stress and expense of managing transportation off of their plates. Even though we elected those people to take care of those specific things themselves. It's part of the arrangement.

You know how like, you get a job and they expect you to do certain things because it's a job? Being an elected official is supposed to be like that. Here comes those saggy air quotes again. But sure, I also understand the appeal of being able to delegate a complicated or unpopular issue to somebody else. Who needs that headache?

That's why I make Warmbo do my taxes. Bot contracts offload every expense onto the private company. So if the project is hit with delays or spikes in construction costs, it's no skin off the state's back, baby, let those private boys figure it out for themselves. And they do? Linda Dyer's daily commute is taking a toll.

Whenever she leaves home, she's paying to use tunnels that used to be free. Now she's thinking about moving elsewhere. Virginia agreed to a 58-year deal with a private company to modernize and expand the tunnels linking Portsmouth and Norfolk, two military towns separated by the Elizabeth River. The tolls to cross can run a driver 525 each way. Many in this working-class community couldn't afford their commute, forcing the state to pony up nearly 300 million extra dollars

to buy down the tolls. Meaning that we could have done that project ourselves, so that project just was a loser. See, the reason you can find private companies who are willing to take on all that construction and operational debt is because toll roads are extremely lucrative. They're literally an ideal investment for shareholders.

They're stable because road use generally doesn't fluctuate all that much during the year, unless we're in a pandemic. They're long-term because these companies are frequently able to lock states into contracts, allowing them to collect toll revenue for several decades. Like I said, typically a period of 20 to 30 years, well after they've recouped the costs of construction. And they're monopolies,

meaning there's no free market protection for the drivers on your toll road. Let's say you go to eat at, I don't know, McBurger Dinks. You know, we all remember McBurger Dinks. I had my first birthday party at McBurger Dinks, and I lost my virginity there. Different day though, obviously, hopefully, obviously. But if you eat at a McBurger Dinks, and lost my virginity there. Different day though, obviously, hopefully, obviously. But if you eat at a McBurger Dinks

and they're gonna jack up their price, let's say they jack up their prices at McBurger Dinks or the McBurger Nuggets gave you the glassy shits again. You can walk across the street to La Taco Fortress where the glassy shits are cheaper. You usually can't do that with a road. So drivers generally have no recourse but to use the toll roads

and pay whatever the companies choose to charge. Or as that news clip I just showed you highlighted, they can move, I guess. And here's where the contracts get really wild. They typically include non-compete agreements that guarantee profits and prohibit the state from doing anything to change or alleviate traffic patterns to the toll road. For example, the Indiana toll road forced the state

of Indiana to pay almost $450,000 in penalties after officials waived tolls during an emergency flood evacuation. Kind of seems like maybe that half million would have been better used for flood relief, but hey, I'm not government, nor am I business. So private companies get to lock state governments into decades long contracts that siphon money

from drivers like a slurm hose. Money that is, once again, supposed to be invested back into the state's infrastructure, but is instead going towards making corporations record-breaking profits for several generations. How could this ever go wrong? Easily, obviously, and in so many ways that we will discuss after this next

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holiday season. Sign up with promo code moreNEWS for a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the page, and enter code MORENEWS. That wasn't festive at all. I demand justice. Justice! Get me festive ads. But first, we were just talking about how states kicked their road troubles to private companies who have historically been really very good

at putting public interest before profits. God, America is silly. Okay, so how did this inevitably go bad? Well, Texas and Florida are excellent case studies, not just for how many books they can ban in one hour, but also for how privately operated roads don't actually help maintain our infrastructure and are just taking billions of dollars

from working class drivers trying to get to their job or pick up their kids on time. Texas and Florida are two of the least walkable places in America, meaning everything is so spread out that you have to drive everywhere. And everything's bigger in Texas. In fact, the number of super commuters in North Texas, meaning people who spend at least 90 minutes

driving to work and at least another 90 minutes driving home from work every day, hopefully while wearing a cape, increased by 49% between 2010 and 2019, according to the US Census Bureau. That number increased by 68% in the Houston area. Countrywide, the number of super commuters has increased by 45%.

Think of how many potholes that is. All of those numbers basically mean that things aren't getting any less spread out anytime soon. And that the number of drivers and the amount of time they spend on the road are increasing exponentially, figuratively exponentially. I don't know if it's literally exponentially exactly, how the math works out.

But so as an ideal representative of current trends in this country, how is Texas handling it? Well, unlike most states, Texas hasn't raised its gas tax since 1991, the year Bill and Ted's bogus journey came out. So now those coffers are drier than that desert where evil Bill and evil Ted sent our heroes to hell while worms dig into their ears.

Toll entities became the default solution to build and maintain roadways in the state. And many of them are backed by private companies. Companies like Sintra, a toll operator based in Spain that was the lead investor in three different Texas toll projects, including the first privately operated toll road in the state.

Sintra also headed a project in Indiana where it more than doubled tolls to nearly $10 on a contract that was meant to run for 75 years before the project went bankrupt in 2014 and faced controversy for dynamic tolling practices in North Carolina that introduced Uber-esque surge fees to jack the price of tolls up even beyond the maximum charge. So good people to entrust with the wellbeing

of your commuters it seems. The Texas contract allowed the project's operators to collect tolls for 50 years with a projected total revenue yield of $18.1 billion. But just four years after the road opened, the company representing the investors filed for Chapter 11 and is now under new financiers. Yep, that's definitely in the best interest

of the public good, right? You pass on a bad investment between corporations and state governments like a steamy Paterto, just hot Paterto back and forth, bad investment, bad investment. What if we just do this all the time? Toll roads are also extremely unpopular in the state actually.

In 2014 and 2015, Texans overwhelmingly voted for two propositions that would direct more tax dollars to the Department of Transportation, specifically to maintain roadways. And both propositions were explicit in forbidding the use of these funds on toll lanes. And the Texas Department of Transportation still tried to funnel cash into toll lanes,

only backing off after public outcry. Even though most toll roads in Texas are concentrated in major cities, 80% of the state's population lives in those same areas. So the tolls effectively act as another tax on top of the gas, property, and sales taxes people in Texas had already voted to use for roadways. And that tax is being paid directly to a private company,

one that will likely change hands several times and may or may not sufficiently reinvest in the road for the rest of your natural life. Neato! Sopping wet air quotes around that, just the dampest neato. Meanwhile, Florida leads the country in toll road mileage, as it does in many terrible things.

Like Texas, Florida has an impressively inequitable tax system. The lowest 20% of earners in the state pay almost 13% of their income via various sales and property taxes to fund state and local services. While the top 1%, like Heathcliff, the Gulf president, pay less than 2%.

There's also no income tax in Florida, which is why old people flock there like migratory birds, President Thinlips included. Every day, he just looks more and more like a Dick Tracy villain. It's a feat. The only other way to fund road construction and maintenance is by collecting tolls,

which means the state's poorest residents are stuck footing the lion's share of the bill because they're the ones paying the most of their income in sales tax, and they're the ones paying the majority of the tolls. So what Texas and Florida have shown us is that toll road projects in the United States of America are inefficient and disproportionately structured

to overwhelmingly favor private companies at the expense of working class Americans. Big shocker, first time for everything, I guess. Many of these roads are operated in a way that any reasonable person would deem improper, but because of the way these contracts are structured, it's technically okay. Most of these improper, but technically proper practices

include blatantly overcharging drivers without restraint, like actual pirates, but on the land, car pirates, cars. We took a day to try to think of a car pirate pun and we landed on cars. Take two more days. Toll rates are wildly different depending on which state you're driving through. And operators are known to issue outlandish fees

for unpaid tolls that can spin a $6 toll into a multi-thousand dollar penalty. Like at San Francisco's Bay Bridge Toll Plaza, which is notorious for the practice. Practically right there in the name. The Texas Department of Transportation recently had to refund nearly $12 million in overcharged toll fees.

And there are countless stories of terrible toll operators all over the country in states like New Jersey, Maryland, California, and Washington. If that sounds corrupt amidst my incredibly honed in and nuanced accent work, it might interest you to know that private toll road projects are also a lightning rod for corruption,

thanks to those lucrative long-term contracts and all that money changing hands. They increase surveillance, as many of them use a transponder based system that logs your license plate and transponder information every time you pass through. And cops in Florida are already using that system to monitor people for unspecified reasons.

Sure, those reasons may be related to ongoing investigations, but they should at least be required to say that when they start tracking people. Gay teachers, 1984. This stuff, good and normal, though. 1986. Also that transponder technology is easily

and frequently abused because it hides the source and nature of fees billed to the driver. For example, back in 2017, woke Francisco's district attorney sued car rental company Hertz for charging their customers exorbitant fees for a plate pass that allowed them to bypass the cash toll lane on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Except that bridge hasn't had cash lanes since 2013. So customers just ended up paying the regular bridge toll plus extra fees that they didn't understand and didn't even know they were paying. And finally, the country's over-dependence on toll roads is bad for climate change, huzzah, because toll roads increase congestion just by existing. And studies have repeatedly shown that highway expansion,

even the addition of carpool lanes, has only increased emissions and increased the number of cars on the road. Everyone got all that so far. Okay, good, because here's the worst part. I said all that other stuff just to get to this point. So if you need to go refill your Starry or take a dump or perhaps combine those activities

in the interest of saving time, you should hit pause now. Or just carry your phone to the bathroom. Let's all go to the bathroom. Let's all go to the lobby. Okay, is everybody safely snuggled into the poo room? Great, because it's time for a whole bunch of hogwash. Biden refused to raise the federal gas tax to fund his infrastructure bill.

Instead, supporting alternative ideas, including asset recycling, which is a popular concept among infrastructure lobbyists representing the private companies who enter into bought contracts with the government. Basically under asset recycling, the government raises money by selling or leasing control of a public work or service such as roads, obviously,

but also things like parking lots and utilities, all to a private company. In fact, a mysterious lobbying group called Let's Build Infrastructure was heavily involved in creating Biden's infrastructure package. And mysterious is never a good word in this context. Also, Let's Build Infrastructure is a sinisterly infantile name for a lobbying group.

It's like calling your tobacco lobby, snuggle the puff sticks. The goal of these cheeky money hounds is to pressure lawmakers into handing more and more infrastructure over to privatization, which has worked out so well for prisons and psychiatric hospitals that I guess we're just gonna keep doing it, victory. And the pressure seems to be working

because as we mentioned, roads are only getting wider and more congested and more run down. Just maintaining them is a complicated and expensive undertaking. Handing all that crap over to someone else so you can get back to the important business of occupying a chair for 17 years and occasionally showing up to vote on stuff

is way more appealing. So for example, in 2009, Chicago leased the operation of its 36,000 parking meters to a private company for a period of 75 years. The contract required the city to increase the price of its meters between 200 and 800% to as high as $7 for two hours of parking in some areas. And because of the non-compete

and profit guaranteeing nature of these arrangements, Chicago is also required to compensate the company anytime access to any streets with parking meters is restricted, like when roads are closed down for parades and other civic events. Furthermore, Chicago isn't allowed to make any improvements on roads with meters, including adding bike lanes or widening the sidewalk.

But that was back in 2009. So Chicago residents only have about 60 more years of this to go. Getting there. Australia tried to launch an asset recycling program back in 2014 that never made it out of the Senate because even after exhaustive hearings, criticisms and concerns over the project's cost,

lack of transparency, fairness to the public, and ability to actually provide quality infrastructure couldn't be satisfactorily addressed. The project was officially shut down just two years later. Asset recycling doesn't have a great track record anywhere because handing control of an asset we all depend on for our survival to a private company who has no obligation to anyone or anything

beyond its shareholders and its bottom line is not a solution. They will choose the bottom line every single time. And we know this because we have decades of examples of them doing exactly that. We've already seen how privatizing our roads has led to bad faith practices that bleed the poorest Americans dry

while diverting vitally needed infrastructure revenue directly into the pockets of assholes. More importantly, they don't actually fix the roads. Both congestion and the need for repairs have only increased. The only thing that has changed is we're taxing drivers twice and giving that money away so our lawmakers don't have to make complicated

or unpopular decisions, even though that is what we hired them to do. And we're already seeing how asset recycling just fast tracks that process, like Sonic the Hedgehog with a gun and a burglar mask. It's literally Ronnie Cox's plot in the film, Total Recall, throwing it out there that the great solution to fix our crumbling infrastructure

probably isn't let's hand it over to Ronnie Cox in the film, Total Recall. Obviously there isn't a simple or easy solution because it isn't a simple or easy problem. Roads are expensive to build and maintain and funding them through taxes alone would be a pretty big burden on Americans. So there probably isn't a solution

that doesn't involve toll roads, but a big reason states turn to private toll roads is to fund highway expansion and the construction of new highways, like in Texas and Florida. So maybe we should stop building new highways. We know highway expansion doesn't help congestion. It actually increases congestion

because it invites more drivers on the road. Highway expansion in turn increases urban sprawl and makes cities less walkable. Hey, didn't we do a whole episode about that exact problem? Roads here are in pretty bad shape. So why don't we focus on improving our roads and bridges instead of building new ones? That would presumably cut down on the need

for tons of additional revenue, which would make toll roads less necessary, which would mean there wouldn't be nearly as many. But of course, this would only work if we cut out the middleman, private companies like Sintra, companies that demand half a million dollars in compensation when the state temporarily lifts their tolls

so human beings can escape a flood. Of course, not all tolling is bad and terrible. After all, taxes are essentially a toll, and taxes are why we have roads in the first place, as well as things like schools, libraries, and presidents. But consigning the infrastructure of our country to private companies, and by extension, its future, seems like a huge step backwards.

Big investment firms understand that America's roads are garbage, just little garbage lanes for us to drive our little garbage cars on, like this one. Look at that pile of garbage. No, really, it actually looks like garbage. I'm not saying it looks bad, which it does, but it looks like a piece of actual garbage.

We've talked so much on this show about how privatizing basic aspects of human life only makes America worse. In a lot of ways, toll roads are the most direct example of that. These investment firms understand that the country really doesn't have the money to pay for roads

because we just rather spend it all on tanks. They're like vultures circling a dying moose. We're a thirsty moose in the desert and private companies are coming in for the kill. They're taking over public infrastructure just like they do with struggling companies, buying low and leveraging government desperation and private companies are coming in for the kill. They're taking over public infrastructure just like they do with struggling companies, buying low and leveraging government desperation

to nab contracts that run for 20 or 30 or 50 or 75 years. Suddenly our government is giving them all the leverage, which they then use to fleece drivers. Our government is just throwing its own citizens to the money wolves because they don't want to deal with the thing we literally hired them to do. And it's weird that we tolerate that. So yeah, that's why toll booths,

something you definitely loved when this video started are actually secretly bad. Changed your mind about toll booths. Toll booths? No, thank you, is what you'll say now and only now. We get so many letters like every week for years, just saying, oh, Cody, please do an episode about how toll booths are amazing and we love them.

And we're just like, are you fucking kidding me? No, no, we're gonna set the record straight, okay? Our audience who's sending us these letters to beg us to do an episode about if toll booths are good? No, the record's been set straight. Now you know. Gosh, just like, just sometimes, sometimes with you people.

Here's one of those letters I was talking about. Wait. Would have been like folded in like a mail. Here's one of those letters I was telling you about. Dear Cody. Thanks for watching the video. Please like it. It would help us and subscribe to the channel.

That also helps us leave a comment about your favorite letter that you've written us. What's that letter say? We got a patreon.com slash some more news. We have a podcast called Even More News. We have this show that you just watched as a podcast. If you prefer that, it's where the podcasts live. We're in the little tiny little podcast beds.

So check those out and also check out our merch store, which has stuff on it. It's, oh, it's, ooh, they got stuff. This pen's broken. It's been broken the entire time. And these are blank. Whoa! Have you ever heard that story that Napoleon used the Egyptian Sphinx for target practice and shot its nose off? Or maybe you've heard that a French astrologer named Nostradamus correctly predicted nearly 500 years of human history. Or maybe someone told you

that the legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in Mississippi. These stories are what I like to call historical myths. Great little tales that may or may not have any basis in historical fact. On Our Fake History, we explore these historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story it simply must be told. If you dig stories about death-obsessed emperors, lost civilizations, desperate sieges, voodoo black magic, and famous historical figures you thought you knew, then Our Fake History might just be your new favorite podcast. If you dig it, then subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.