What is up with toll roads?

-I am from the west. Never in my life have I heard of a toll road until we recently drove from Utah all over the country to the east coast. (about 3,000 miles. Phew!) I passed through all the toll roads (many reasons, confusion mainly) without paying. So my real questions are, what is an I-pass? Do these tolls apply to me? Are you freaking serious about having to pay a toll just to drive on a road?! These happened in Illinois by the way. Remind me NEVER to live there! lolMost roads are public roads paid for by people's taxes. so anyone can use them

Toll roads are private roads that are not paid for with tax dollars so everyone has to pay to drive on them.



Basically an i-pass is a "prepaid toll", so someone puts like $50 on an i-pass and every time they go through a toll booth, the scanner electronically takes how ever much the toll is off the pass so you don't have to physically pay money. (it's kind of like a pre-paid debit card for tolls)
Shouldn't have done that. They will find you by taking a picture of your license plate and sending you the bill in the mail and if you don't pay it they can charge you huge fees and it only gets worse from there. Here in Tx. some ppl. have been put in jail b/c of not paying.
The money you pay to use the toll goes to building new roads and keeping them clean. Did you notice how clean the toll way was compared to any other highway?
Jayda, It`s like this...people that pay taxes on their property etc. have enough burdens other than paying for roads they may never use...so the person just passing through gets to share the expense.
Most states have votes on it. The option is usually to build a toll road, or raise taxes to pay for a new expressway. In some cases, it becomes a tax because it's a road most people will use. In other cases, the new highway will be in an area where only a few people will use, IE to a remote housing development. So, rather than make everyone who lives in the city or state pay for it, they let the people who want the highway built, the people who will use it, pay for it when they use it. Typically, they remove the tolls after the road is paid off. The tolls aren't necessarily for generating revenue outside of paying off that loan.



The I-pass is just a prepaid transponder so that you can get through faster. Rather than stopping at every toll plaza, and paying cash, when you drive it every day, you know how much you spend on tolls per month and you can just load that onto the pass. They usually give you a discounted rate for the tolls as well when you do that. Then they just have wireless signal towers you drive through that scans your account number and automatically debits your charge at that plaza at the discounted rate.



The tolls apply to anyone who drives on the road. And as for what would happen, it honestly depends. E-470 in Colorado recently did away with the toll plazas to reduce fuel consumption and to make people traveling on it easier. So you either had an EZpass (same as I-pass), or they would photo your license plate and mail you a bill every month. Of course the EZ pass was cheaper. It used to be that if you didn't stop at the plazas, not only would you get charged for the tolls you passed, but you would also receive a ticket in the mail for failure to stop at a toll plaza and it was something like a $150 fine. Hopefully that isn't the case on the roads you were on.