FRAUDscoop

Great article about those HOT lanes, we paid to build these roads with our tax dollars, and now you have to pay again to use them, great idea..

MIAMI - Pay-as-you-go express lanes may be coming to Florida’s gridlocked highways if a $278 million transportation experiment works here. It’s a big if. Crews have installed seven miles of slender, 42-inch poles to create two new High Occupancy Toll lanes on northbound Interstate 95 in Miami. The state’s plan is eventually to create a 21-mile Miami-to-Fort Lauderdale zone that will give drivers who are willing to pay for it a 50-mph commute on a traffic-jammed highway that carries 280,000 motorists a day. But even before the first toll is imposed, Miami’s notoriously impatient and aggressive drivers are veering in and out of the new lanes like Olympic skiers on a slalom course. On the first day, accidents tripled. Tie-ups and tempers flared. Dozens of the 1,700 skinny “candlestick” barriers that separate the inner two HOT lanes from four local lanes were mowed down like blades of grass. Hundreds more of the white pop-up poles, set 20 feet apart, were scuffed and nicked by drivers who jumped into the express lanes to avoid congestion or jumped out to get to their exit. “What were they thinking?” said Jesus Urdaneta, a banker from Venezuela. “This might work in the Midwest or the Northeast but not in Miami.” Similar “congestion-priced” express lanes, sarcastically called “Lexus Lanes” by critics, are popular in states such as California, Minnesota and Colorado. Miami’s will be the first in the Sunshine State. Tolls, deducted electronically by SunPass, may vary from 25 cents to $2.50 for the initial seven miles, rising and falling with traffic volume. And if they work here, look for HOT lanes all over the state, including on Interstate 4, Central Florida’s most congested road.
Pay As You Go Express Lanes Proving Challenging in Miami « A1A South