NO to Higher Bridge Tolls - Mike Murphy Comments

Article Source: Mike Murphy

Recently San Bruno Patch ran an article about the being proposed INCREASE in San Francisco CA Bridge Tolls.

Mike Murphy offers his comments:

Bob Riechel, yes go ahead and use my comments, I just added the East Bay Times source for my percentages. I have seen different numbers from different sources, but they all agree that Santa Clara county ( and Sonoma) would be the big winners at the expense of Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano Counties. There are no bridges in Santa Clara County and they will have the most voters of any of the regional counties, it is free money for them, they should not even be allowed to vote on this bill.

Mike Murphy, Mills Park

The cost to reach the peninsula will be $9.00 in the near future! I am against this toll hike.

The tolls are a special tax on Bay Area Residents that should not exist. Bridge tolls were originally temporary and were supposed to end once the bonds that paid for their construction was retired. Regular road taxes were supposed to pay for maintenance from the bond payoff point forward. It is not right that there are many roads in California that are very expensive to maintain per mile, tolls are not charged on those roads (mountain passes and huge freeway interchanges on the LA Freeways come to mind). The state should add a couple more cents to the gas taxes and eliminate tolls on all public roads in California.

We would be able to remove these unneeded toll booth road blocks. The bottlenecks at these toll booths cause millions of hours of wasted personal time and company payroll costs. All those vehicles are sending greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

Another reason to vote no on this proposal is that Santa Clara County, currently paying less than 2 percent of the tolls, would receive 19 percent of the proposed project funding, because of geography they have little need to cross the bay bridges. If any price increase is to be approved that money should finance bonds which would add new non-BART trains to piggyback on the existing bridge and CalTrain/Sacramento/ACE Corridor infrastructures adjacent to or near each of the bridges. These trains should be in competition with BART, hopefully introducing a little more cost consciousness, crime prevention and cleanliness into each system. BART is wasteful and poorly managed in my opinion. A duplicate system would also provide a backup in the event of another earthquake.

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Robert Riechel

E=Mail: SanBrunoPatch.Robert@Yahoo.com

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My Posts: http://patch.com/users/robert-riechel

Photo Credit: San Bruno CA Patch Archives

Source Credit: Mike Murphy

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