Country roads

In other commuting news, I have what some regional transportation authority is pleased to refer to as an “E-ZPass”; a transponder on my car’s windscreen that allows the Virginia Department of Transportation (and other jurisdictions, were I to choose to travel outside the general confines of NoVa) to suck out enormous sums of money in exchange for the privilege of sitting in traffic on the Dulles Toll Road.

(And let me just say that it burns my bacon the way VDOT has raised the tolls on this road—without any discernable improvement to same—by an order of magnitude in the less-than-ten-years since I left. Used to cost $0.75 to go from Reston to the plaza by Leesburg Pike; now it’s $3.50.)

Anyhow, for some reason the Toll Road Authority decided to give users the illusion that they give a rat’s posterior about our opinions, so they sent out a survey last week. At one point, I think they must have been trying to get a handle on how much more they can raise tolls without risking armed insurrection, and had a series of screens where they presumably intended to give users different combinations of values (money versus time) for us to choose.

Then, of course, they’ll turn around and do whatever the hell it is they intended all along.

However—whoever designed the survey screwed up somehow, since all five of the five permutation screens were identical. I did not twig to this until I fetched up at screen four, and I couldn’t use the back button, so I’ve only got the final two screens:

This only reinforces my sense that they really have no interest at all in our responses; they’re going to raise the tolls yet again.

It also tells me that they’re all pretty much idiots.