‘Surveillance’
courtesy of ‘ep_jhu’
Get off 66 at the DTR, and you have two choices: go directly to the Airport and pay nothing, or take the road with exits, and pay as you go. Apparently, though, there are enough people who are driving out to the airport and thence hitting the private roads. Gov. McDonnell has signed a bill to act to prevent this, which is great, the main airport road is for airport business, and I get this. The problem, though, is that they want to automate this process.
Yes, they want to put a camera out there to do photosurveillance and detection of who is and who is not on Airport business. I’m not exactly sure how that would work, and none of the initial reports seem to indicate how this machine would hand out its $600 tickets to the masses. How the heck would this work?
I live and work in the District of Columbia. I write at We Love DC, a blog I helped start, I work at Technolutionary, a company I helped start, and I’m happy doing both. I enjoy watching baseball, cooking, and gardening. I grow a mean pepper, keep a clean scorebook, and wash the dishes when I’m done. Read Why I Love DC.
Good Lord! $600!? That’s higher than the state’s DUI penalty.
I very rarely have to go out that way, but last weekend I took the tool road to a conference in Reston. Due to my unfamiliarity, I almost got on to the airport lanes and corrected myself at the last moment. I realize that it would have been my own stupidity if I had taken the wrong lane, but I wonder if with the new system I would have been hit with a $600 fine. That seems really excessive for something that could be an honest mistake. I know on some toll roads they do everything by photographing your license and sending you a bill. How about they do that, but then charge you to maximum toll ammount or 1.5 or two times that ammount if you take the airport lanes and dont actually got to the airport on airport business?
There are many from west of Dulles that take the time to loop through the airport just to get on the airport lane headed east. You skip the toll and don’t have the gnarly traffic. I would imagine this would crack down on those violators.
Since the Metro construction started, the Toll Road has been nasty headed into DC.