FYI: from the Newton Planning Department’s Friday Packet on September 2: “Massachuetts Department of Transportation: The Massachusetts DOT will be conveying (sic) a public hearing on Monday, September 12th, in the War Memorial Room, Newton City Hall, starting at 6:30pm. The proposed changes include changes in the toll collection gantry locations and rates through the implementation of all electronic tolling (AET) along the Massachusetts Turnpike and the Metropolitan Highway System. MassDOT has announced that AET will “go live” on October 28, 2016. For more information, please contact Donny Dailey at 617-945-4272 or [email protected]”
Does anyone know what locations are being proposed for the gantries?
The gantries have already been installed along the entire length of the Pike. They’re also working and collecting data at this point, although no tolls are being charged/collected. The gantries were activated recently in order to calibrate them and make sure they’re working properly before the Oct 28 launch date.
Sallee, the gantries are already up and tested, just waiting to be enabled. Newton’s gantry is just west of Lowell Ave. This public hearing is presumably to solicit feedback on the proposed toll amounts, but like most MassDOT hearings, it’s this meeting is most likely just a formality.
See tweets and links posted in this thread for details.
Sorry Readers: I merely forwarded the Planning Department’s notice of a public hearing to discuss gantry locations. What is amazing to me is that the public heating comes AFTER the gantry installation. Process?
I remember watching Candid Camera as a kid. It was funny. This however is not funny at all. It’s just another example of how our state government needs a good whack upside the head. The story of the Mass Pike began with a government lie that the tolls would eventually go away. But that doesn’t bother me half as much as the jobs they’ve taken away and replaced with technology. Those were real jobs. Jobs that people needed. Jobs that put food on the table for families of modest means. Gone, and replaced with a bunch of cameras.
And personal info grabbers
If I’m interpreting your comment correctly Marti, that’s another very important issue that deserves attention. I’m certainly no constitutional scholar, but these tracking devices [or “personal info grabbers”] push right up against the edge of the Fourth Amendment. It’s appalling to me that people so readily accept being tracked by any government entity. It’s something that’s completely out of control in this country. It’s been clear since the terrorist attacks 15 years ago that the government has no respect for the Fourth Amendment. This is just one more in a long list of examples.
Mike,
The purpose of tolls is to fund highway spending, not provide jobs for toll-takers. Would you have the phone system go back to having operators connect calls, for example? Should we go back to weaving with hand-looms? And so on, and so forth.
@Robert– I agree with you about the purpose of the tolls. But my opining isn’t about “purpose,” it’s about the method employed to achieve that purpose. I think the method speaks directly to our state government’s misplaced priorities.
Affordable housing is a popular cause for Massachusetts politicians. And I’m fully in support of affordable housing. But where is the government’s emphasis on jobs? How are unemployed people supposed to pay for their “affordable” homes?
In the case of the toll collectors the government is putting revenue ahead of jobs. It’s a shortsighted decision, and it sets an awful example for the private sector.
Toll collection is frequently included in lists of the most dangerous jobs. Collectors are subject to abuse, assault, robbery, and health risks from exhaust and other auto by-products. They are literally a couple feet from severe injury or death every minute of their jobs.
There are many public positions that have been lost over the years, under the euphemistic term “belt tightening”, that we see the negative social impacts of. Manual toll collection isn’t one of them. It reduces efficiency much more than it provides any public benefit, and puts people at risk.
As for privacy, those same toll takers (and toll booth cameras) could have been watching your travels for years. Just because it would have been much less efficient to track individuals doesn’t mean it wasn’t possible. Driving isn’t a right, especially driving on a limited access highway like the Pike where there are alternatives.
That doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t stand up for the privacy *policies* that they expect regarding cameras and data collection. I just don’t see a strong constitutional argument to be made.
Well Mike, toll collectors won’t have to worry about their “dangerous jobs” while they’re standing on the unemployment line. My assumption is that they’d prefer to be working. And these are not jobs that were lost to any necessary “belt tightening.” Was it really not profitable for the Pike to pay people a modest salary to [literally] collect money? This is about a state government that’s clueless. A government with such little respect for working men and women that they replace them with technology, even when it won’t generate a single penny more in revenue.
Mike,
I believe toll collectors got a raise in 2014 specifically in anticipation of losing their jobs due to electronic tolling:
http://boston.cbslocal.com/2014/01/18/mass-toll-workers-to-receive-pay-raises-under-tentative-deal/
Younger workers also got retraining benefits. Sounds like a deal that thousands of private sector workers would have loved to have: retroactive pay raises, two years warning, extra benefits.
I have great sympathy for anyone who loses their job. I’m content they were treated (more than) fairly given the situation. I have no nostalgia for phasing out an now-unnecessary and dangerous profession that cost the public from $40K to over $130K per collector, more than $55 million per year in 2014, without providing any significant benefit.
I have no problem agreeing to disagree. I understand your perspective, Mike. In my opinion, this state desperately needs two things… jobs and affordable housing. I think our Governor and government have done a very poor job on both.