Toll authority has become a monster

For those of us who remember, the Illinois Tollway was to have been converted to a free expressway system years before now.

It has grown into a bureaucratic and intimidating monster, now with the capability of surreptitiously fining us into oblivion.

We are hostage to the notion that the only way to have spanking new pavement every few years -- unlike other federal, state, and local roadway systems -- is to continually pay through the nose directly out of our pockets in addition to the portion of the state budget we pay for now for all the other roads.

Now they want to turnstyle the Eisenhower over to this corrupt system.

Where are your statistics that show how many tollway employees have been eliminated with the I-Pass system? Or have they been reassigned to violation court duty? What a magnificent violation court building in Downers Grove they have to work in!

As far as paying $38 million for an outside company to manually read and confirm the license plates of violators, I would have been glad to write the scanning software to automate it.

It probably would have been executed in a few hours instead of 13 months. Once you have the license plate, it's duck soup from there to access to the state license database and the I-pass database.

So what's the problem? So long as government entities assume the general public is ignorant of what computers and scanners can actually do, we will continue to have our pockets picked by these mostly patronage bums. As an unemployed, outsourced software engineer, I would have contracted with you for a song.

Dave Souders

Arlington Heights