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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Ep. 30: Toll Roads - The What, How, and Why
What if toll roads were the key to sustainable infrastructure? Join us as we uncover the history and modern implications of tolling on U.S. roads. Starting from the origins of turnpikes, we trace the evolution of toll roads through the lens of historical milestones like the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike—the first paved road in the U.S.
From the rise of automated toll collection systems to the financial realities of road maintenance funded by gas taxes, registration fees, and tolls, we uncover the hidden costs and public subsidies that keep our roads running.
Doors are closing. Public transit, that's my way to roll On. A metro, I'm taking control. Bus stops, train tracks it's my daily grind. Public transit, it's the rhythm of my life. On this episode, we dive into the topic of tolling. Are there too many tolls? Not enough? Do tolls come close to actually paying for the roads that you drive on? Find out on this episode of Transit Tangents. Hey everybody and welcome to this episode of Transit Tangents. My name is Lewis and I'm Chris, and today we are covering a topic that you've probably encountered at one point or another if you've been on a road trip somewhere, or maybe your city has these in places along major highways and whatnot. But we're gonna be talking about tolling and, fortunately for us, this is another episode where we've got a subject matter expert on our hands here, chris. Uh, chris has got a lot of experience in the tolling industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for the last five and a half years I've worked for a company that specializes in all types of transportation technology, but my division specifically has been focused on toll roads and specifically that, automating those toll roads. So this is a topic that I'm very, very familiar with and wanted to bring to the transit tangent community, to the gondola gang, if you will. Yes, and wanted to bring to the Transit Tangent community, to the gondola gang, if you will, and talk about this mode or this infrastructure mode that we have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, as usual, though, we're going to kind of start off with a little bit of the history of tolling, and Chris found some really fun things here. You can go ahead and share it because you found it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's great, we'll do a quick history here. You can go ahead and share it because you found it. Yeah, it's great, we'll do a quick history here. I was sort of looking back at the history of tolling in the United States and I knew, if you think about toll roads, we've been tolling roads and passages since the beginning of time. It's literally in mythology, where you pay a toll to cross the, was it the River Styx? Tolling is a concept that goes back again to the beginning of human civilization, but tolling as we know it today. I wanted to look at the history of it and I found it really interesting. First, toll roads were called turnpikes and I thought well, that's a funny word, why do we call them turnpikes? And that's when I figured out that it is actually an old English term turnpike. T-u-r-n and then P-Y-K-E. A pike was this barrier to any type of roadway or any type of passage, and it usually included pikes which were Like spikes essentially Like spikes.
Speaker 1:What do they call them? In high-speed chases you roll out. Yeah, you roll out the spike thing yeah whatever it's called.
Speaker 2:There's a name. We don't know it. I don't know what that's called, but yeah, it would basically be like sharpened wood posts spears, whatever on a roadway and you would get to these checkpoints and at each checkpoint they could essentially turn them and move them off of the roadway or turn them back into the roadway or whatever and allow passage through. So, that's where we get the term turnpike, which I thought was really, really interesting.
Speaker 1:And there's a fun little bonus term here that was added on here called a shunpike. And you're a shunpike if you're somebody who avoids toll roads, essentially, and sneaks around them on the free roads and whatnot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, shunpiking is where you deliberately avoid toll roads. Isn't that also the last name of the I'm a shun pike here in Austin.
Speaker 1:I have my Google Maps set to avoid tolls because there are weird toll roads in different parts of town and I just don't like paying for them.
Speaker 2:Isn't that also the last name of the bus attendant in Harry Potter?
Speaker 1:Maybe I don't know Like Sam or. Stan Shun Pike. Let us know in the comments if that's the case. Let us know in the comments. If that's the case, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Interesting, but anyway. So that's kind of where all this comes from. In the UK we had sort of turnpike authorities being created around 1706. Wow, it's called the Turnpike Trusts, and they started basically tolling these ancient roadways in the UK. That the local residents were not very happy about this when these turnpike authorities were created, so this system of tolling these roads made its way to the British colonies.
Speaker 1:And then after the Revolutionary War, is when the United States formally adopted turnpikes, yeah, um, so obviously, like the the first kind of couple here that that were created are are in kind of the northeastern united states where there was this more density of people during that time frame, uh, but in 1792 we had the first paved roads in the united states that were turnpikes, uh, and they were the philadelphia and lancaster turnpike, uh, which was the first paved road in the United States.
Speaker 2:Which, when we say paved, it's really just like crushed granite poured over the road, compacted yeah, it's not like what we think of as a paved road today, but yeah, the Lancaster to Philadelphia Turnpike connected Lancaster, philadelphia to, or Lancaster Pennsylvania to, philadelphia. It was originally 62 miles long and it was so popular not by the residents, but it was so popular by the local government that it created this huge boom in turnpike authorities all over the Northeast. And when I say a big boom, I mean there were over 50 in Connecticut and over 67 in New York. Wow, it's crazy.
Speaker 1:Right, and I mean at that time there was no infrastructure.
Speaker 2:Basically, I mean, imagine you know we're talking 1790s America, very fledgling nation no money, really struggling to meet the bare minimum for our citizens. We're just, you know, paying off a ton of war debt. So you have this country that knows that westward expansion is inevitable, but there's no money to fund roads or to expand cities, right, and so all of these turnpike authorities, which were originally private corporations, they started building roadways Right and the federal government did want to kind of support this to continue happening.
Speaker 1:So the federal government did create what was called the Cumberland Road, which went from Maryland all the way to the Ohio River, and that spurred even more of these private turnpikes to be built off of this main road here, just enabling further westward expansion which would hopefully drive more population growth and more resources and more money and more tax revenue, so that the government could kind of pay off all these debts and continue to build up the infrastructure in the country.
Speaker 2:And if you have a city that, say, is 50 miles off of this Cumberland Road, you want your citizens to be able to reach the Cumberland Road so that they can get back to the more populated areas of the country, so that goods can come into your city. And that's where all of these private roadways started to be created, and almost every single one of these private roadways had some type of toll associated.
Speaker 1:You also have to consider this was well before things like gasoline taxes, which we'll get into in just a minute as well. Right, so you had to fund it. You had to fund it somehow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yep, your hay tax you had to pay, that, you had to give your horse hay to, oh my god, a hay tax that would have been the equivalent of hay tax that's pretty, that's creative.
Speaker 1:Um, kind of a fun little anecdote that we found going through this was that, uh, bikes, bicycles, bikes were basically like the kind of culminating factor for a lot of roadway paving in the us, which is kind of amazing. Uh, it was I want to get the name of this the the progressive good roads movement.
Speaker 2:Uh, from 1880 to 1920, uh really led to kind of the paving of more roads in the us yeah, it was started by cyclists who wanted better roads to get around their cities and to get sort of into the outskirts of the cities, and so more companies started creating paved roads. And again, this is later 1800s. So from the first toll road to here, there's just all this rapid expansion of private corporations. Now we're looking at more organization and more expansion of these paved roads. And yeah, it was bicycles. So if anybody ever tells you that roads aren't meant for bicycles, they're wrong.
Speaker 1:Right. A good reason that those roads existed in the first place was because of bicycles.
Speaker 2:It was better paving technology came out of it. They're the ones who got together in four cities to really start building better roadways. They made it a political movement, Literally. Bicyclists are the reason that roads became a public priority which man?
Speaker 1:what a, what a? You know you want to say that is a good thing, but maybe it just spurred a whole, you know, led to paving, led to more cars, led to all this. Is it really pre-car?
Speaker 2:but the funny thing about that, though, is by 1910 the american automobile association did actually join the good roads movement, and not only joined it, but took it over, so car ownership became the priority. These car lobbies seized this progressive movement of the Good Roads movement and started pressuring cities to make roads better for cars and not bicycles.
Speaker 1:Which has spiraled us to the situation we're in today as far as roadways go and whatnot. But not to skip ahead too far, after World War I we had the Federal Highway Act of 1921, which funded interstate highway construction, and tolls at the time were used to fund that infrastructure investment that was going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is pre-interstate system of what we think of as interstates today. This is creating the Us highway system. So think of, like us highway 90 uh, us six, uh, route 66, sort of these interstate uh travel roads right in many cases today.
Speaker 1:They're not going to be the kind of like divided highways that you see, but they'll be the major kind of like one car lane in each direction, double yellow line down the middle.
Speaker 2:You know, they're still generally like a 55 mile an hour speed limit or something and they go between these cities but they're not necessarily the kind of divided highways that we have for the interstate system yeah, yeah, and they, they spurred this huge boom in automobile ownership because now there are roadways for you to be able to go out and joyride or get from one city to the other, and by the end of the 20s, over half of american households had a car, and I didn't realize that it happened that quickly. Yeah, but by the 20s, half of american households had a car and I didn't realize that it happened that quickly.
Speaker 2:But by the 20s, half of American households had a car. Yeah, and I mean Absolutely crazy.
Speaker 1:That reference back to our kind of episode about Amtrak. I mean seeing how quickly it went from 96% of passenger railway Sorry, 96% of city-to-city travel being on passenger railways dropping so quickly. I mean it's because of how quickly everybody got into cars and how how you know the car makers were able to make cars affordable pretty fast as well.
Speaker 2:Within, within like 15 years, of half of Americans owning cars, or 15 years prior to that, people were still taking steamboats up the Mississippi that that transformation happened so, so fast.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, we talk about about technology changing things now quickly. I mean, that's a whole other type of technology change that happened so fast.
Speaker 2:So to support this big boom, cities and states had to build more roadways and the federal government didn't really provide a lot of money toward roadways. A lot of it was left up to the states to build out this infrastructure and, just like today, states didn't really have the funds to build these roadways. A lot of it was left up to the states to build out this infrastructure and, just like today, states didn't really have the funds to build these roadways. So the vast majority of them ended up going back into some type of tolling scheme to help fund and pay for these roads. Once we got to World War II just after World War II, tremendous boom in automobile ownership. Again we saw sort of the expansion into suburbia which needed more roadways to support, and so that's when the federal government got serious about looking into a better federal highway infrastructure.
Speaker 1:Right, and what's interesting about that federal highway infrastructure and there's an interesting book you should check out if you are interested in this that covers some of the history actually, with Eisenhower passing all of this legislation it's called City Limits by Megan Kimball. But that infrastructure was actually put in for, like, safety reasons. It was the military purpose of being able to have our military be able to move across the country quickly, because, as you said in a much earlier episode, like you know, there's a story about an army platoon or something trying to that. Eisenhower was in Right, trying to get from one side of the US to the other, and it took an insane amount of time to do so.
Speaker 1:The roads were super disorganized, poorly maintained, and that was kind of the reason for the interstate system. It wasn't necessarily to like solve traffic getting between cities or even like helping traffic within the cities. In fact, uh, in some digging in this book, uh, the author finds notes, uh, from eisenhower where he specifically says that it's not meant for travel within the cities and that states were taking advantage of this money to do so. But, um, but nonetheless, that's what it ended up being used for, because the federal government was offering to pay for 90% of the costs of these interstate highways, leaving states only having to cough up the remaining 10%.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we needed it for defensive reasons. But the way you sell it to the public is think of all of the commercial opportunities and the investment in the community. And it did do that. It did create massive amounts of commercial activity all around the country. It was a major investment in the US. But what's interesting about that? What is it? The Federal Aid Highway Act. When that passed, there were provisions in there that federal roadways because it was being used as federal money weren't to be tolled, so all of the initial interstates. There was literally legislation that said you can't toll these roads and that is-.
Speaker 2:That's kind of a first for the.
Speaker 1:US.
Speaker 2:It's kind of a first exactly, and it's something that has stuck in this sort of culture of the US for a long time. I don't know how many people I've had a conversation with about toll roads where they say, well, it's not supposed to be told, well, we'll get to that in a minute, right, yeah, in the very beginning. They're right. The Federal Highway Act, they didn't want interstates to be tolled, right. In fact, by the 1960s, about 1963, all roadways that were planned before this Federal Highway Act had pretty much been opened at this point and there were no new toll roads after 1963, with some few exceptions, pretty much tolling major roads had stopped.
Speaker 1:We're going to jump right back into this episode in just a second, but first, if you have not liked this video ahead and do so also leave a comment. We love reading all of them and respond to as many as we can, and be sure that you are subscribed so that you catch every episode as they come out, please share this with your friends, and if you don't have time to watch youtube videos in the future, you can catch us on any of the podcast platforms that are out there.
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Speaker 1:Uh, then, you know, after this period of polling not really happening, we kind of fast forward to 1980 and wear and tear on the highways is really showing, uh, because of how much use they were getting. Uh, you know, trucking like increased massively. Obviously regular people were driving back and forth but, uh, with all the big heavy trucks going back and forth utilizing this that maybe weren't going to be utilizing that previously, where the cargo rail lines would have been carrying a lot of that, now, in many cases it became more efficient to put them on a truck and take them directly to their destination. So there is now start to be a lot of questions about how are we going to maintain the system now that we have built it out to the extent that they did?
Speaker 2:Yeah, cities and states were happy to accept the funding in the beginning, but then it comes back on the cities and states to maintain this infrastructure Right, and that was a major problem. So in the 1980s this, like you said, became a major issue and cities started to think, well, what do we do for the future? And the federal government also realized this is a problem. So in 1991, congress passed a federal legislation that amended the previous Federal Aid Highway Act and allowed for tolling on roadways in limited cases, and those limited cases were usually when a tolling facility or, excuse me, when a road facility was being rebuilt like a new bridge or, excuse me, when a road facility was being rebuilt like a new bridge, a new tunnel or, you know, completely new spur to the interstate, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:So from 1991, that's when we start seeing local agencies and cities and states really start to focus on new toll roads, which led to a big boom over the next two decades really, and I don't know exactly the details of how this one works in particular, but growing up in upstate New York, the New York State Thruway, which is part of Interstate 90, is told all the way across the state of New York. I know in parts of Massachusetts it is too so even today some of these interstates are told, but in some states they're not at all and they're not allowed to be in some states based on those state laws. So, yeah, yeah, just an anecdote that I I had. I mean, it actually is a decent price too. I mean getting from rochester to the massachusetts border. I remember I think it's 14 or 15 dollars in tolls just to drive on the interstate through there. Yeah, um but, yeah.
Speaker 2:So after the 90s and sort of this boom in toll roads, what you started to see was a return to this, this tolling system. So a lot of facilities that went up, especially within those first 20 years, included what you think of as a toll road. You're driving up to a booth, there's an attendant, you're throwing coins at them because you're angry about using a toll road.
Speaker 2:But there's an attendant. You have to stop and then proceed through the booth. Fast forward to today.
Speaker 2:Most of those toll roads have actually been completely automated, which is a pretty cool use of technology.
Speaker 2:We've now sped up traffic and reduced some congestion on these roadways by allowing sort of this free-flowing way to collect tolls. How most of those work is that you have some type of transponder in your car a little sticker or an E-ZPass or something like that and as you drive through what we call toll gantry, the RFID chip is read by a reader somewhere above you or next to the car and it knows exactly who you are, because your customer identity is on this RFID chip. Another way of doing this is, if you don't have that RFID chip, you can just drive straight through the toll gantry and whoever the agency is image of your license plate, and then you can actually look up the customer via the DMV databases and that kind of stuff there. So there's multiple ways to sort of collect tolls now that don't require you stopping at a booth. It's very fast, it's very efficient and, as you're doing this, you are helping support the roadway that you are driving on. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And speaking of supporting the roadway that you drive on, uh, the main way in a lot of cases today, that that is done is through the gas tax. Uh, and for the most part, uh, the federal government hasn't increased the gas tax since the 1990s, the early, early 90s, uh, so the federal gas tax hasn't gone up at all. Most states it hasn't gone up at all. Some states have increased it in one way or another, kind of depending on the politics of the state, frankly. But either way, I think it's important to note that these gas taxes and your vehicle registration fees and the tolls, they don't get close to covering the cost of the roadways.
Speaker 1:The roadways are heavily subsidized by the federal government, by the state government, and they're no way close to paying for themselves, which is a fun thing to point out. If you're having a discussion with somebody who thinks that public transit is a waste of money or things like that, you can remind them that their roads are very socialist and that they're being heavily subsidized by people who don't own cars and the like. A lot of very car-brained people like to think that the roads are paying for themselves and everything and that they pay for it through the gas tax and in reality it's somewhere in the realm of like 50% to 60% is maybe covered, but they are heavily, heavily subsidized. Just wanted to put that out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that is the argument for toll roads. Nobody likes to pay for toll roads. I get it. Nobody's excited about it. When I first took the job in this industry, I remember my boss now boss specifically said this is not a sexy industry. Nobody loves it. However, this is the argument for toll roads.
Speaker 1:And that is again.
Speaker 2:The way that most states and municipalities raise money for road construction is through the gas tax, and at the time that seemed like a really fair way to do it. The more you drive, the more you're going to pay for that roadway. But if we don't increase the gas tax to help pay for those roadways, we're slowly taking money out of that system. Not only that, the purchasing power for the amount of the 15 cents, or however much it is that goes towards road construction projects, hasn't increased with inflation right.
Speaker 1:So you're just further eroding this base right especially on like road construction, construction of any sorts of things right now, like the prices have ballooned like crazy. We see that with with roadway projects, with transit projects, whatever it may be, and I mean it is one of those things too. I mean to just like counter a little bit here because I'm in favor of tolling in the vast majority of cases here. But you do want to be careful in some areas where you know if you're in a part of the country where public transit is little to non-existent basically you know, increasing gas taxes too much, having the price of tolls be too high you're going to be hurting regular working folks, lower income folks who are relying on these roadways to get to and from work.
Speaker 1:But I would make the argument that in places where there are good alternatives, where you don't need to drive on the highway to get to the location, or where there is really good public transit a good example is like we talked about on the congestion pricing episode in New York City do you need to drive your car into lower Manhattan? Are there better alternatives or other alternatives that are basically just as good, if not better, than driving to get to that place? Yes, there are. So I'm very much in support of a toll in an instance like that. But in other parts of the country where folks are relying on a car and there's really no other option, it becomes a little trickier. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree with that, which is why there's multiple types of tolling. There's open road tolling, which is where all the lanes are tolled and it's all free flowing highway. There's projects like express lanes and HOV lanes. I really like the idea of express lanes because you get to choose whether or not you take the tolled lane and it theoretically should be faster than normal traffic.
Speaker 2:So there are many options out there that states and cities are starting to employ that are aimed at allowing people who have the means to use the system to use the system. But there are definitely communities out there that have been sort of cut off from their cities and it costs more for them to get in, and that does hurt those communities, especially when you talk about cities like Austin, where a lot of the lower income population has been sort of forced out due to high property taxes and then they're also getting taxed to get back into the city. That being said, you still have to pay for the roadway, but there may be means of that agency of giving discounts to these communities or whatever the case may be, to lessening that blow.
Speaker 2:Something else that's really interesting that not many people are going to think of right off the bat with what is impacting the amount of money we have for roadways. But fuel efficient vehicles and electric vehicles actually take away from the overall road budget. Right, and that is so counterintuitive. It's not what you would think, that those actually hurt our transportation budgets, but right now they are and a lot of cities and states have again.
Speaker 1:And, to be clear, the reason is because they're not paying a gas tax.
Speaker 2:basically, EVs aren't paying a gas tax, and more fuel-efficient vehicles mean we're using less gas for the same amount of distance. Those are great things, don't?
Speaker 1:get me wrong, I'm not arguing against those those are amazing things, uh.
Speaker 2:I absolutely support more ev adoption, right, uh, and more hybrid adoption, that sort of thing, um, but it in real money. It does take away from the overall budget of the state agencies, and there are agencies and states now that have, uh, looked at this and now your registration fees may be a little bit higher but again that's yeah for an ev or something. I think texas is doing this, California has done this, but your EV registration may be a little higher because that money then goes back into supporting those roadways.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that is an interesting one that people definitely don't think about and it's an argument for kind of rather than messing with gas taxes just like increasing tolling or increasing registration fees or finding another way to collect fees for roadway usage.
Speaker 2:Essentially, yeah, because no one in the country really pays the amount they need to to support the roadways.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:We have expanded to such a point. This goes back to the argument we made in our episode about suburbia and can we fix it? The suburban landscape is a drain on cities and the regions because, again, you have all of this pavement, you have all of this infrastructure and it costs a lot to maintain, right, yeah, and it's also really interesting because you also think about major capital improvement projects to the cities in these regions. I think of on I-10 in Louisiana, we mentioned the Calcasieu Bridge that they're going to completely replace. That is a huge undertaking by the state government. The federal government's actually paying for a significant portion of this bridge.
Speaker 2:I think of this new bridge in Alabama, where I grew up. In Mobile, they are replacing the Bayway Bridge and building it up to the right federal height. They're replacing these tunnels that currently restrict the amount of traffic that can flow under the river in Mobile, that currently restrict the amount of traffic that can flow under the river in Mobile. The cost of building this bridge is more than the entire DOT budget of the state of Alabama. So there's no viable way to build it unless you are adding tolls to the roadway, and is that what they're doing?
Speaker 2:in that case, absolutely, they're adding tolls to the roadway, which another funny story. But that roadway, the tolling was actually canceled for a while. The project got put on hold Suddenly, two years later, when the pressure's off the governor, she said oh, let's build a bridge, let's toll it.
Speaker 1:She won her election and there's gonna be some tolls, yeah.
Speaker 2:So yeah, just a funny anecdote there, gotcha, but just some quick numbers on the tolling industry in the US. Right now, 35 states have active tolling projects. So again, you've probably come across this if you're listening to this podcast.
Speaker 1:You've also got $13 billion in toll revenues being collected by US agencies. That's a little outdated, it's 2015.
Speaker 2:So that number's definitely gone up since 2015.
Speaker 1:But a sizable amount and I mean, if you were to do more of it, you could probably fill the subsidy gap on the roadways a bit more. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Over 5.7 billion passages on toll roads, going back to 2015 as well. So again, that number has definitely increased as well.
Speaker 1:We also have $14 billion in capital investment over three years by the top 40 us toll facility operators. So, uh, those are roadways that are being told and putting the money back into those roadways, uh, that they're using. I mentioned the new york state thruway as an example. Uh, one thing I will say about the new york state thruway when the construction isn't happening, the road is one of the like smoothest roads have been on, which is a far cry. I at one point did a six-month road trip across the United States. I lived in a half-size school bus driving around, rock climbing and mountain biking and whatnot across the country and experienced some terrible roads on interstates in some states.
Speaker 1:New York is not one of them.
Speaker 2:That road is immaculate always, basically, so just an anecdote, One that kind of surprised me. Toll roads have a higher safety rate as far as vehicle fatalities. So interesting enough.
Speaker 1:I wonder if part of it has to do with the roads being better maintained and having better at night, seeing lines painted better and know that sort of stuff. That's an interesting one.
Speaker 2:Could be. It could be a whole host of reasons, but all of this is to say there's a lot of investment right now going in toll roads around the country and a lot of people, I think, have this misconception that toll roads are something new or that we're just, you know, the, the, the government's just trying to get more money out of you, when in reality, this is how society has operated until we decided to build the federal highway network.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but this is how society's always operated and what we realize is, I would almost say, the federal highway. Not that it was a failed experiment, but the the idea that that it would be entirely covered by federal money and then not have to touch it again. That was a failed line of thought right. And now we are on the other side of that and we're improving our roadways, and this is one way to do it.
Speaker 1:And I think if we're going to ask people to pay for transit every time they use public transit, you know it's a reasonable request to pay. It doesn't have to be a lot of money, but to pay a small user fee when you're driving places feels reasonable, especially considering, again, that we ask people to do that on the transit side of it. So you know, can they be annoying? Yes, Should they be everywhere? I don't think they need to be everywhere. No, I don't think so either, but there are strategic places and areas that they definitely should be used. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:All that being said, what is your experience with tolling? Are there tolls in your state? Tolling are there tolls in your state? Are there not tolls in your state? Uh, let us know in the comments we'd love to see it.
Speaker 2:Have we changed your mind on tolling? Is there any new information from this podcast that you didn't know? For instance, usually when I tell people, hey, evs, get to use the roadway for free in a lot of places, they they're like what? Yeah what do you mean? They get to use the road for free. So if there's any information that you learned today that maybe changed your mind, definitely let us know in the comments.
Speaker 1:And, with all that being said, if you haven't liked this video already, please consider doing so. If you're watching on YouTube, consider hitting the subscribe button. If you're listening on a podcast platform, please give us a five-star rating. We'd love to see it. You can find us anywhere you listen to podcasts Apple, spotify, all those places. If you want to support the podcast directly, you can do so on our website, trendsattentionscom, and look for the support section. You can also do so. This is a new thing. In the comments on YouTube, I believe you can leave a sticker or something like that. I don't know, but we just appreciate you watching anyway.
Speaker 2:So yeah, absolutely. If you know Pete Buttigieg, send him the link to this. We'd love to hear his thoughts on tall roads as well, because he's going to be our best friend someday.
Speaker 1:Yes, and with all that being said, thank you all so much for watching and we will see you on the next Transit Tandems Tuesday.