Cost
Consumers are not required to pay the cost of the transponder. The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority used to charge a one-time fee to buy the transponder. They had planned to replace that charge with a $0.50 monthly fee, but both fees were eliminated due to criticism on Massachusetts Turnpike Easter Sunday congestion in 2009.
The legality and constitutionality of offering discounts to holders of transponders issued by Massachusetts as opposed to transponders issued by other states has been upheld twice at the federal appellate level, in 2003 by the First Circuit in a case arising out of Massachusetts and in 2010 by the Third Circuit in a case arising out of New Jersey. Significantly, both courts based their rulings on the fact that Massachusetts transponders are available on equal terms to in-state and out-of-state residents and that anyone is allowed to have a transponder from more than one state at a time, choosing which transponder to use in each toll transaction to obtain the cheaper rate. The court in the New Jersey case noted parenthetically that "...out-of-state residents who commute regularly to Boston each day might very well decide to carry only a Fast Lane transponder."
Read more about this topic: Fast Lane
Famous quotes containing the word cost:
“The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“The true reformer does not want time, nor money, nor coöperation, nor advice. What is time but the stuff delay is made of? And depend upon it, our virtue will not live on the interest of our money. He expects no income, but outgoes; so soon as we begin to count the cost, the cost begins. And as for advice, the information floating in the atmosphere of society is as evanescent and unserviceable to him as gossamer for clubs of Hercules.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)