Is this a joke?

I have to agree. Your roads SUCK. You pay tolls up the tailpipe and your roads are the dirtiest, bumpiest, pothole-filled, I have ever seen.

 

I hear ya about the "upset after 10 years". I was pulled over late at night by an Officer Mike D**d in the summer of '95. I had just bought a Honda CRX and was meticulous with it. Anyway, I was working LATE at Best Buy one night doing inventory and stopped at Taco Bell for "dinner" around midnight. On the way home I finished eating and didn't like the Taco Bell bag sitting on the seat next to me. So I stopped in a gas station which was closed to throw out the bag. I did in the garbage and was pulled over not a mile down the road by Officer Dowd. He asked me what I was doing in the gas station. I told him the whole story (which was easily verifiable by him running the registration). He gave me a ticket for "Criminal Trespass". No joke. $275!!! Oh yeah, he also told me my wheels were the wrong size for the car and stuck out to far outside the wheel well. That was another $165 and he sent that in the mail. Got that one a week later. No joke!!!

Mind you, I had NEVER gotten a ticket before. Never been in trouble. And was IN my Best Buy uniform (so clearly I was not making any of it up).

Bottom line, I went to pre-court to fight it. The Asst. DA dropped them both, apologized profusely for it and wrote a letter apologizing later. It was well-received.

Funny (and oh so true...) story. I met a girl a few years later who was hitting on me pretty hard at a gas station. We were chatting and she said she had a dad who was a cop. I joked to her that I wasn't going to talk to her anymore. I asked her her name and she told me her last name. Turns out good ol' Mike was her dad. I seriously considered taking her home and getting to know "Daddy's little girl" in ways that would have been sweet sweet revenge. But I have my standards and I couldn't bring myself to doing it even it it would have brougt great closure. Believe me, that trip would have been all business, NOT pleasure.

But to this day, I wish I had......

 

The Interstate North of Milwaukee going out of town deserves some credit too: Normally that's when door openers, radar detectors and the like start falling off the windshield/sunscreens when driving through. It feels like that patch is made out of bricks.

 

We like the feeling of the olde country. That's why we try to duplicate the "cobblestone feel" on our roads.......

;-)

 

Was she good looking? Well Im taking a wild guess that if she worked at the gas station she would have been on kid #3 by the time she hit 21 as what seems to be the case in the south. No kidding, I once saw a Mom my age ( which was early 20s,) working the register while holding her baby out in the backroads of GA round 1am. Depending on how she looked, I probably would have showed Little Miss Dowd that not only her Dad carries a night stick... No attempt to brag, just the dumb behavior of young men...

I would agree that you got screwed over in your case. But at least you were let off. In my case, come on, he could have called the Acad, Rest Home, even his HQ as earlier in the summer we carried the Colors for them in a parade. No pride for that cop, no class, nothing posititve at all.

Personally I think the roads of both WI and Ill are even and given the amount of travel I do in the winter I think I offer a valid opinion. I would trust truck driving roots FerrariFrank's opinion but in my experiences they all have been just fine. People definitely speed more here in Ill sadly, and there seems to be more blind eye to this by the border and the racetrack known as 53 near Schaumburg. But that stretch between Kenosha and Racine, what a joke, why don't they just remove all the gas stations and McyDs with doughnut shops?

RocketBoy

 

You guys crack me up. This whining about the tollway..the I-Pass... get over it. The annual tonnage of freight that pounds its way over our tollway is enormous. The cost of repairs is very high. You'll have a hard time convincing the folks in the rural areas of our state that it's their taxes that should pay for those repairs. The stance has been..let the people who use it pay for it. It's that simple. Don't like it? Don't use it. And as for the "grass is greener over there" stuff, I've lived in Europe, and I'm with Andreas. You think our bureaucrats are bad? Try dealing with the French versions. You gripe about taxes? At a recent Rotary lunch I heard the head of the International Chambers of Commerce tell about Denmark, where he has lived the last several years. He bought a new car and had to pay the usual sales tax, and then an additional "new car" fee that nearly equalled the cost of the car. And at year's end he recieved a little note from the government informing him he had to pay a special "income tax". It seemed that, since his daughter had gone off to college, he had a bedroom that was unused. The government then taxes you for the income you "could make" if you were to rent that unused bedroom to a boarder. Come on people, we have it very good here. Now, let's get back to talking about cars before someone invokes the name of "Waco" or starts talking raving about "precious bodilly fluids". Geeesh

 

Come on guys, there's at least one D**khead on every force.

My story....
I was in WI, running south of Mkee on 94, heading home from RoadAmerica in my '66 MGBGT back in about 1980. It was raining lightly. I was in the left lane at the time, about 9 car lengths behind the car in front of me, cruising at about 65-70, like everybody else on the road. I noticed a large sedan in my rearview closing rapidly, so I sped up a bit to clear the car in the lane to the right, signalled and moved over. The sedan pulled in behind me and turned on the light on the dash.

I pulled over, left to the median. The cop came to the window and asked for my liscense. I asked what I was being pulled over for, she replied, "I got you going 80 in a 55." I said that I was never going 80 and that I only sped up to 70+ to get out of the way of the car barrelling down on my tail. I asked if she had been on the side of the road clocking with radar. She said no, that she had "paced" me with her speedo. I asked if I had passed her on the road, she said no. I said that even if I was going 80, what legal reason did she have to be going 80+ to catch up with and pace me. (I'm sure she was on her way back to the station for shift change) She curtly replied,"Tell it to the judge." Knowing that probably 90% of the out of state drivers that are issued tickets do not return for a court hearing. She went back to her cruiser and wrote the ticket, when she returned she asked if I was going surrender my license or post bond, I told her I would post a cash bond (because I said I didn't have a credit card ) and started digging around the car for loose change, counting and recounting the whole time. I kept her on the side of the road for almost 40 minutes, standing in the rain being drenched by the dirty water spray off of the cars and trucks, while we sat warm and dry in the car. She was getting quite impatient with me, and repeatedly said that she was going to have to "take me in" but I kept digging for money. After she started to draw her pistol, I reached into my pocket, pulled out a wad of bills and deftly counted out the amount of the bond. She was PISSED, I bet she had even more fun expliaining to her cohorts at the station why she was soaking wet. The whole time my GF was scared sh**less, took her hours to get over it.

 

Yes, Rocketboy. Back in the '80's when I was driving Trucks. You can definitely feel the difference in the Tollroads vs. the "Freeways". Has anybody ever driven down through I-65 in Indiana? In the Winter? In a Big Truck? Case closed.....

And Daryl certainly hit the nail on the head regarding all of the Frieght/Commerce that passes along the Tool Roads every day. It really is amazing.

But, we really should have good roads all around. I believe that Gas Taxes, along with all sorts of other taxes go to Illinois Roads.(Freeways) But Huskerbill is right that we have some of the worst roads in the Country. So where is all of the $$$$ going???? Politics. B.S. Politics......

 

My griping about the tollway, as evidenced by my posts, are that the system has been an incredibly huge black-hole, into which is and has been poured astronomical amounts of money, which has been used for a myriad of illegal and unrelated purposes besides building and maintaining roadways.

Pay the toll, and then sit in the traffic jam. PAY TO SIT IN THE TRAFFIC JAM?

The Tri-State tollway was supposed to be paid of and converted to a freeway in the '60s. Instead the tollway system has spread like a virus, more money, more graft, more corruption and so on.

 

haha......And silk hair plugs for all

 

RIGHT ON!!!!! That sums it all up right there, Bill.

 

Daryl, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you didn't switch your brain on for a few seconds before you posted this. If you had, you would probably have realized a few things:

a) Tonnage of freight is far less over the tollways than over the free highways, because the trucks avoid the tollways. Most trucks going from Wisconsin to Indiana or vice versa take (free) I-94 for as much of that distance as possible. Anyone who has tried to drive into Indiana on I-94 can testify that that road is almost solid 18-wheelers---all taking that route to avoid the tolls on the Skyway (which is not part of the rest of the tollway system, but the same principle applies). Similarly, freight-hauling trucks make up a very small percentage of traffic on the tollways.

b) Most of the "tonnage of freight" that moves through Illinois moves along the free interstates: I-80, I-55, I-57, I-70. Have you taken a trip on I-55 or, especially, I-80 recently? Lots and lots of trucks. Tons of freight x miles of road is far far higher along the rural interstates that the Chicago-area tollways.

c) People in Chicagoland pay taxes; people in other parts of the state also pay taxes. People in Chicagoland also pay tolls to use the highways; people downstate use the highways for free. "[L]et the people who use it pay for it," eh? Sounds good. But by that logic, either the tollways should be free (the consensus view here, I think) or downstaters should be paying tolls. In fact, it would not surprise me one bit to learn that more taxes come out of the areas served by the tollway than the areas that are not. If that's true, then aside from being charged tolls, we are also paying tax dollars to maintain highways elsewhere, that other people use for free. And if it's not more, it's certainly not much less, so it's not like downstate taxes are subsidizing the highways around Chicago.

d) While the highways in Chicagoland may get more use than rural highways, there are thousands of miles of rural highways! Many, many times more than the extent of the tollway system. So, if the roads around Chicago must be repaired more often, think about this: you can rebuild a 50-mile stretch of road ten times for the cost of rebuilding a 500-mile stretch of road once. Actually, it's probably less, because transportation costs to get equipment and materials out there will be less.

By the way, I live in Chicago now but for more than half my life I lived downstate, so I have seen this issue from both perspectives. No objective person could call it fair.