My holiday weekend ended in Madison to visit some friends who I hadn't seen in a while, and after several years of trying, are finally having their first child. I left Madtown around 2pm Sunday afternoon, and headed south/east on I39/I90 towards Rockford. Bad idea. Somewhere north of Janesville (which is ~17 miles north of the Illinois/Wisconsin border) traffic came to a halt. For the next two hours, I (along with tens of thousands of other drivers) inched along before finally discovering the culprit: the toll plaza at mile marker 4 in Illinois. Now, I understand the rationale behind toll roads, and have generally not complained about contributing my share towards Chicago's clusterfuck highway system. But charging me $1 to wait 2+ hours for the privilege of driving 20 whole miles before stopping again to pay a toll offends my sensibilities.... and really pisses me off!


... Not to mention the environmental effect of having thousands of cars idling for 2 hours, wasting tens of thousands of gallons of gas and diesel... Brilliant planning.

 

it took me almost an hour and half to get from the southside of the city to the airport this morning. i90 was SO jammed between the loop/o'hare i had to get off and take the local streets... we ALL know how great chicago local traffic is...

my hat's off to you man.. sux0rs...

 

Governor Rod Blagoyovich welcomes you to Chicago's open road tolling

 

I need to get an iPass thing before Christmas... FFS!

 

And it's not like I have to worry about them figuring out that I'm speeding... I can't even if I want to!

 

Although they should have made the open road tolling three wide, and made the cash lanes fewer. But Ipass is great. But when there is traffic it still sucks. We'll see how this open road tolling holds up...

 

Damn....that sucks. You should've called. You could have exited off I90 before the first toll plaze and taken 72 Eastbound to Randall. From there you could have stopped by for a quick drink or two, maybe some lunch, and then head back out to IN taking either Highway 88 from Randall, or taking a few more local roads to get back on I90 a little further east of where you were.

Anyway, hope you had a good weekend.

 

They've done that on I90 eastbound over by the River Rd toll plaza. Unfortunately for all the IPass users, all the cash throwers block up the open IPass lanes until the very last moment.

It still screws the IPass users. I'd think that the state and Cook Co. in particular taxes fuel enough to keep the highways toll free. How is it that many other major cities can keep up-to-date highway systems flowing without toll revenue?

 

Actually, once I got past the first toll plaza, things flowed smoothly all the way in and down (took 290 south to 294 which was slow towards bishop ford). The plaza has a good effect of metering traffic onto 90, ironically.

It was already after 5 when I got to Randall Road, I think. I needed to get home.

 

In California you pay 11% of the vehicles value every year for registration. A very large portion of that revenue goes to Cal Trans and the roads.

Nothing sucks more than paying 11% of of a cars value for DMV registration.

I'm lovin the $78 a year in this state.