In Kentucky, back in like 2015, we built a much needed new bridge across the Ohio river with money from the Obama administration.

When construction was almost complete, there started being rumors about tolls. And the city was like “nah, we wouldn’t do that”. And then a month later they were like “here’s how the tolls are going to work”.

It’s all hired out to a third party that expects to make profit off of it.

And the tolls don’t recoup the construction cost, they offset future maintenance costs.

And after a few months in operation, the private firm collecting tolls announced that they weren’t making their projected profits, so they were increasing the tolls. It was like $2.50 to cross one way. And it quickly went up from there.

After maybe 6 months they announced that they were having trouble collecting tolls on semi trucks. So they were again raising tolls on cars.

A lot of people have to cross this bridge just to get from their house to their work. So now it’s like $6 or $7 per day just to commute.

The private company is awful. There have been people who have transponders on their cars that end up with huge fines and late fees because they get double billed - billed by the transponder and billed by the license plate cameras. It takes hours to get through on a phone call. Their payment website is constantly down. Now they’re just telling everybody that it takes months for them to generate your bills so you can’t even believe the numbers, or like sometimes they’re just randomly billing customers that have transponders for trips they didn’t take.

IT IS FUCKING HORRIBLE.

And the "drivers’ that should be paying the largest part of the bill - the trucking companies (as their vehicles weight the same as a dozen cars or more) don’t pay anything and just people trying to get to work every day have a $200 per month commuting bill that they didn’t sign up for when they bought their house on the other side of the river.

And the city is stuck in this contract - where a private company can unilaterally raise rates and overcharge and double bill - and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ve heard stories of people trying to register their car and finding out it has thousands of dollars in tolls. Buying cars that have thousands of dollars in tolls outstanding that can’t be registered until the bills are paid.

And all of this, not to build a bridge. The bridges were built before the toll company even got involved. But just for future maintenance on the bridge.

And the net effect of all of this is that people who live in this city have learned to never use the big beautiful new bridge. Because even if you do everything right, you still get screwed. So all the tolling has done is coerce more people into using the old, outdated, beyond-design-capacity bridges that the new bridge was built to take the load off of. The new bridge is constantly empty and the little two-lane 70 year old bridge next to it is busier than ever.