Paying for speed and ease of use makes sense to me. Which means I’m theoretically in favor of toll lanes on busy roads.  But when the toll lanes are the only lanes and the fee can hit $50 for nine miles of pavement, I have to draw the line.

Tolls on Route 66 can be avoided, though, when there are two people in the car, so Tom and I drove in together this morning. The toll, which changes every six minutes based on volume, was $34 when we passed under the sign. But four minutes later, when we hit the restricted section of the highway, the supposedly free-flowing part, the road was still clogged. We crawled along the expressway for miles, not seeing clear pavement until more than halfway through the trip.  Bad enough when you’re traveling for free, but hardly worth paying for.

And that’s not all. The main reason we drove in this morning was to avoid a $10 surcharge for not using the special transponder that has a switch you can set for “HOV2” (signaling that there are two or more people in the car). It had been a year since we rented two of these transponders and apparently had only used one.

Paying for open pavement — and paying not to use a transponder. If this is the modern world (and it most assuredly is), please drop me off in the 19th century.