Toll Roads News, a “journalistic venture” by some liberal cretin, is truly the stuff of legendary nightmares capable of inducing suicide, heart attack, coma and even death in some.  Such generic, and furthermore excessively stupid, nonsense is vile. A pro-toll propagandist, to this end using liberal rhetoric that surely finds fans amongst the anti-tax and individualist imbeciles, a vile monsterous perversion of all sensibility of any worth–

CRUSH THE TOLLCISTS!

Anyway, let’s closer examine the idiocy of this nonsensical “background” article closer:

Around the world there’s an upsurge in toll roads because tax financing is not producing good enough highways.

Of course, this is strictly not true. There are several reasons that a State would want to pursue toll road financing rather than tax income and public spending; but “good enough” (quality) is not one of them. The state might have very limited funds available, or desire to shift the responsibility onto a body which it in turn can blame (to avoid it self being blamed) for any potential problems that arise with the execution and operation of a motorway or a system of such.

The reason for this “upsurge” is many, but this “upsurge” is largely illusory outside of parts of Europe and the U.S. Much of the world has for long time had motorways being primarily tolled networks. British advisor’s in the 1950’s encouraged Japan to establish a network of toll roads to speed up the development of new roads and infrastructure.  In the U.S. and Europe, those politicians and organisations arguing for the establishment of more toll systems (many always have and still do, exist) use various ideological arguments at times to justify their decisions, arguing from (like the author of that moronic piece of yellow “journalism” that is the TRN) the liberal market-loving perspective, but the true reason is simply one of cheapness. The U.S., burdened by the perverse disease known as Congress and the corrupt Senate, full of failed politicians the brain-dead American public constantly vote in and cherish like the sacred cow of liberty, has for long time been unwilling to provide funding for roads, and thick-witted local governments remain just as unwilling and inexcusably inept. Thus, they ponder different solutions, and one of those is giving the mission to a corrupt money-hungry investment banker, the vilest devils of them all; a good example of this kind of verminous dregs are the filthy criminal scum of Macquarie Infrastructure Group.

Voters reject tax hikes because they don’t get highway value for the tax dollar.

Voters reject tax hikes because most of the time they are short-sighted idiots, something politicians and corrupt commercial enterprises like to encourage. This is not always the case however. Phoenix voted yes to a series of tax increases to fund the regional motorway network, and Phoenix is a terrible desert hell-hole. This has nothing to do with “highway value for tax dollar”, a majority of voters don’t think in such terms, and furthermore, even if they did so, there would be no meaningful way of comparison, no picture complete to make it easy to comprehend, the geography of the matter is far too complex. Something our intellectually challenged “journalist” would have a hard time understanding.

And they are frustrated by congestion on inadequate overloaded roads & tie-ups which cost tens of billions in wasted fuel, missed meetings, downtime from work, and unnecessary pollution and accidents.

Oh, personalisation of the problematique, great. Never fails to convince idiots of whatever you’re trying to sell.

Tolling is a way to build and rebuild roads without having to resort to taxes. Toll roads dip into the capital markets for their funds, not into taxpayers’ pockets.

Capital markets funds came from nowhere. Typical liberal rhetoric, “not into tax payers pockets”. Alluding to the whole “tax is theft” argument. If something is theft, property is. Propertarian cunt.

It’s the fairest system and the most efficient…

As fair as fair tax. Never seen that nonsense before.

And the prospective toll revenues will often allow special measures such as the complete undergrounding of roads in environmentally sensitive areas, special services such as separate cars-only roadways, and electronic guideways for hands-off, feet-off driving (the ‘automated highway’) to make roads safer.

Prospective. An often absent prospect, I might add. Since when is the automated highway a good thing anyway? It’s basically an new form of that old stupid concept of Personal Rapid Transit. It’s as stupid and loathsome as flying cars. And those other things apply to tax-funded projects all the same, but to be honest, roads are rarely tunnelled due to environmental concerns. As is known, at best, it only shifts the location of the pollution. It’s generally done to satisfy whiny NIMBY’s and people whose idea of environmental concern is fighting something they think is “ugly” from being near them.

Because of the logic in favour of tolling

Shit logic.

major new road projects around the world will mostly be built as toll facilities

Not because of your great toll-logic, even if so.

And increasingly as old highways need rebuilding private sector funds and management will be needed. Tolls will be the way people pay.

Fuck your system.

The important thing is they all bring highway service into the market economy.

Oh, no, I know where this is going. Do you?

Change is difficult. The automobile is an intensely ideological contrivance and its associated infrastructure is equally controversial. An important part of elite opinion dreams of a return to rail transit and bicycles, and opposes most new provision for motor vehicles. Populists denounce tolls as “taxes” and assert that “we have already paid for roads” in gas taxes.

ELITE! Is that the so called “liberal elite” (meaning soft-centrist social-liberals in the U.S.)? We can see from what political perspective this person speaks. He speaks for the liberal capitalists, the children of the 1980’s, the Raygunites, the psychotic lunatics, the raving insane, for the owners of investment banks, for the supporting pillars of world capitalism. You’re not being controversial, your controversy is an illusion. You’re perfectly in line with what is expected.

Tolls are not taxes but the price for a service. Now that service may be well or poorly provided. It may, or may not, be considered value for money. But the user-pays principle of tolls – that those who benefit from a road pay directly for its use – is good.

No. The user-pays principle is always bad. That’s the argument of those who oppose any social programs. “Why should I pay for their (insert some nonsense about homeless, hobos, drunks, criminals as slurs for poor people) health care/ education / whatever?” Mind you I am not a supporter of the price system whatsoever however. But this is not about what I want. This is about how vile this person is.

So army engineers have built roads and general taxes have been used to finance them, but in the early days of the industrial revolution the most common method was the corvee, or forced labor. Each able-bodied citizen was required to present himself with pick, shovel or other tools to work for several days per year fixing the local roads & or else send a substitute. ‘Pitching in’ for the common good worked when the people doing the work were the ones who benefitted so the corvee sometimes worked on a very small scale, but most roads are used by outsiders and the people doing the work then resent it.

“Why should we slave away, take time off from our income-producing job when the guy who benefits is that merchant passing through or those sightseers going by?” they ask. The ‘corvee’ was described in the late 18th century in England as a “ridiculous farce” because of evasion, favoritism, loitering and general ineffectiveness (p101) In Virginia citizens eligible for statute labor were described as “working out the road tax” and taxed the equivalent hourly wage rate if they failed to show up for statutory road work. Like other kinds of taxation the corvee was seen as unfair and oppressive and enlightened thinkers argued for the user-pays principle.

Enlightened scum argued for the user-pays principle. Notice also the intentional induction of “forced labour” and the comparison of this with taxation (as well as classic liberal slurs, “unfair” (poor rich folks worked so hard to earn their honest money!) and “oppressive”, totally original nonsense. Fuck you.

“When the carriages which pass over a highway or bridge…pay toll in proportion to their weight or tonnage, they pay for the maintenance of those public works exactly in proportion to the wear and tear which they occasion of them. It seems scarcely possible to determine a more equitable way of maintaining such works.” So wrote the famous thinker Adam Smith in his “Wealth of nations.”

What’s with this use of the strange wording “thinker” anyway? Fuck Adam Smith. Fuck the Wealth of Nations.

At a time when Americans (and many other peoples) are skeptical about the value they get back for taxes paid seeking loans and investment secured against toll revenues is often the only practical way to finance needed new roads

Blah blah. Ugh. I get a headache.

Only overhead gantries such as those used for signage are needed for the electronic toll ‘readers’ and for video license plate recognition cameras. In this way electronic tolls can be collected more economically than road taxes and are less likely to be squandered by politicians and bureaucrats!

Typical anti-tax liberal American.

A further major advantage of tolls in the era of microcircuitry and electronic communications is that toll rates can be varied by time-of-day to help combat traffic congestion and guarantee a swift trip through to those who really need it, as measured by their willingness to pay a premium for that privelege. As the stop-&-go traffic on the urban highways of America and Europe make painfully clear, highway space is a scarce and highly valued commodity, especially during rush hours. The prices of food, telephone calls, fuel, airline seats, metals and many other items vary according to supply and demand to the benefit of consumers and suppliers alike and there is every reason why urban highwayspace should do the same. It will provide revenues to improve transportation facilities, help transit compete, and persuade those who can reorganize their movement to leave the scarce roadspace to those motorists who need it most. Best of all it will offer people choices & spend less, get less or pay a premium for premium road service. It’s the way the rest of the market economy works.

So much for being controversial. The market economy is failure.

Such toll projects if properly implemented will be win-win reforms.

Reformist! I hate reformists! Shitty reforms at that.

“There’s a simple solution to this traffic problem. We’ll have business build the roads. And government build the cars.”
- Will Rogers quoted Bay Area Council

Liberal humour is so unfunny.

“There’s no such thing as a free road. There’s a toll road, or there’s a taxing road, or there’s no road.” Our adaptation of an IBTTA (the tollsters trade association) slogan. 1996

If free is the absence of the price system, then there is such a thing as a free road. Tollroad Pigs Lobbyist Propaganda Association.

“Road building is not a government monopoly any more. Those days are over.”

- Federico Pena, US Secretary of Transportation, Transportation Research Board address, Washington DC, January 8, 1996.

Again, what a surprising thing for a populist idiot to say. Since when was road building a government monopoly anyway? The only thing that has been anything even remotely approaching that is planning and funding… But idiots, etc.

Apparently the ingrates in the Netherlands are planning to enact a road pricing scheme… sickening– the world is spiralling into an abyss of failure the likes of which never have been seen before.

In closing, Toll Roads News suck.

Never forgive the pigs for the destruction and vileness.

The final phase in the liberal subjugation of the world.

The Japan Railways Group, more commonly known as JR Group (JRグループ, Jeiāru Gurūpu?), consists of seven for-profit companies that took over most of the assets and operations of the government-owned Japanese National Railways on April 1, 1987. Most of the liability of the JNR was assumed by the JNR Settlement Corporation.

JNR Settlement Corporation (日本国有鉄道清算事業団, Nippon Kokuyū Tetsudō Seisan Jigyōdan?) was a corporation formed to handle long-term debts and redundancies following the privatisation and breakup of Japanese National Railways on April 1, 1987.

It was dissolved on October 22, 1998 after being unable to pay back more than 30 trillion JPY in long-term debt. Following its dissolution, its assets and liabilities were inherited by the Japan Railway Construction Public Corporation.

In 1998 JRCC assumed the assets and liabilities of the JNR Settlement Corporation; JNRSC’s existing long-term debts were incorporated into the national government’s general debt. The JRCC was dissolved on October 1, 2003 and its responsibilities were passed to the Japan Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency (JRTT).

Increased efficiency and profitability. Sure. Silly liberals.

The notorious Ferrier Estate in Kidbrooke, south east London – used as the gritty backdrop for the film Nil By Mouth – is being demolished and a new 4,000 home suburb built in its place.

For fucks sake.

Aylesbury Estate, soon to follow suit and be demolished and “regenerated”, probably as something equally revolting as the Ferrier Estate.

A curious phenomenon occurred at the farm of Balvullich, on the estate of Ord, occupied by Mr. Moffat, on the evening of Monday last. Immediately after one of the loudest peals of thunder ever heard there, a large and irregular shaped mass of ice, reckoned to be nearly 20 feet in circumference, and or a proportionate thickness, fell near the farm house. It had a beautiful crystalline appearance, being nearly all quite transparent, if we except a small portion of it, which consisted of uncommon sizes, fixed together. It was principally composed of small squares – diamond shaped – of from one to three inches in size, all firmly congealed together. The weight of this large piece of ice could not be ascertained; but it is a most fortunate circumstance that it did not land on Mr. Moffat’s house, or it would have crushed it, and undoubtedly have caused the death of some of the inmates. No appearance whatever of either hail or snow was discernible in the surrounding district.

The Scotsman, 1847

We’re making pornography.

Some form of large-scale and high-rise public or social housing estates exist in most of the major cities around the world. Their characteristics are different in many regions, and sometimes drastically different within a region, sometimes depending on from where certain influences have come. In some areas, there are even subtle differences and unique designs occurring in different regions of the same nation. This will be a multi-part series on so-called “commieblocks”, so named for their prevalence in the SSSR and nations in their sphere of influence. To some extent, they have evolved independently in many places around the world for the same purpose – to provide cheap but relatively high-standard housing to the masses. They are rarely built to this day with a few exceptions; in Russia, Japan, Turkey and Hong Kong, new estates are still going up. In the west, the concept and design of those buildings have become considered as discredited by social problems most clearly illustrated in the United States.

United States

In the United States, the city of most interest regarding housing estates is obviously New York City. The New York City Housing Authority has a great number of housing estates of some size, providing some 8% of the city’s flats and homes. As is to be expected from a country like the U.S. , the NYCHA is underfunded and delegated to managing by the best of its abilities an aging housing stock in dire need of renovation. Most of the housing estates were built during the 1950’s and 60’s, with the help of Robert Moses, a man who has been insulted in such rubbish books such as “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro, a piece of character assassination blaming motorway construction rather than other social factors for the decay of inner city New York.

The housing estates of New York are generally speaking of a poor standard, even when ignoring their poorly kept status. Often they were built on the cheap. In many of the older towers, there are no balconies. An interesting design is featured on the Luna Park Houses in Coney Island, next to the old Coney Island Amusement Park (what’s left of it) and on the site of the old Luna Park site. Built in 1959-1961, the 23 story towers feature a central elevator tower surrounded by an open space that serves the purpose of hall and a communal balcony. The flats are arranged in four wings connected to the communal balcony and elevator tower in the middle. The areas around the towers consist of lawns and trees, playgrounds and various recreational facilities. A metro station is found in the south of the estate, the West 8th Street – New York Aquarium station. There are five towers in the estate. They were also featured in the videogame GTA IV as the “Firefly Projects”, though significantly scaled down.

Close by is also the Peter Warbasse Houses, consisting of 5 more conventional but nevertheless interesting and in the New York area unique design. Also of some note in the Coney Island area are the Sea Rise Apartments, a greyish white brutalist complex of buildings of varying heights, to some extent reminding of classics such as the Trellick & Balfron Tower’s in London. Most housing estates in New York City have brownstone and brick façades, but the Sea Rise Apartments offer a pleasant change from this with stark grey concrete and curious alignment of building components, as well as an ornamental treatment of the façades themselves. The estate was completed in 1974 and has three tall sections of each 24 stories. Elevators for the complex are provided in elevator towers external to the main building bodies, clinging to them like ladders.

Of further interest in the area are (in Brooklyn): the Linden Plaza Houses (built over a metro yard) in East New York the many estates of Brownsville, Brooklyn, the Tompkins Houses and the Lindsay Park Houses (22 stories and with renovated balconies), the Bushwick Houses, and many more. Of special interest in the Bronx are the curious Morrisania Air Rights, a large complex of three towers with some brutalist ornamentation, tallest one being 29 stories and completed in 1980, the Concourse Village Apartments, six towers of 25 stories each in a more traditional commieblock design, completed 1963-64. Along the East River of Manhattan all the way up to the Trans-Manhattan Expressway, plentiful wonderful housing estates can be found, particularly the wonderful 27 and 26-story Esplanade Garden Cooperative complex deserves mention, found between 145th and 147th streets and 7th and Lenox Avenue, next to the Lenox yard of the New York Metro.

Last but not least deserving of a mention is the wonderful estate of Co-Op City, featuring wonderful towers in a nice park-setting on the outskirts of Bronx in Baychester.

Housing estates do exist elsewhere, but they have typically been demolished, as in the case of Pruitt-Igoe and many of the estates in Chicago (Robert Taylor Homes, Cabrini Green) and replaced by the incompetent and fail Chicago Housing Authority with hideous so called “mixed-income developments” or exclusively more up scale housing.

On July 16, 2009, at 10:00 am Central Time, the building was officially renamed Willis Tower.

Sears Tower is Sears Tower. Structural names ought to be kept for historic consistency except when the nature of the business in the building is reflected in the name (if a structure housed a court but no longer do so, former hospital, etc). Fuck Willis Tower.

Oh jolly. Retarded advertisements. Kill with fires.