The city recently (read: over the course of a year or so) did a bunch of construction to convert several of the lanes on tollway I-294 to make them open road tolling (where cars with a toll tag don't have to go past a booth and stop at a gate, they can just drive normally under a big arch that spans several lanes). I'd thought they were going to convert the whole highway, but apparently they just set up like five lanes of open road tolling, and then there are about four or five tollbooths still operating on the right.

Last night we needed to get off at the first exit after the toll stop, and we weren't sure how much room we'd have to get over, so we were in a right-hand lane when we hit the toll stop. We'd been zooming along, but suddenly we were stopped in a huge line of cars that were slowly stop-starting their way through the toll gates. Meanwhile, people with tags (like we have!) were zipping by in the open road tolling lanes to the left.

We grumbled a bit to each other, and then I spotted this billboard with an artist's rendering of what open road tolling looks like. The artwork on it of boxy cars speeding under this space-agey tolling arch resembled one of those 50s cartoons for the house of the future.

I pointed this out to mr rampy, complete with a rendition of that spritely "do da do da do do do do " music (like at the beginning of the song "Mr. Sandman") that they always play in the background of those cartoons (you know, as the oven rotates to reveal an easy chair or products of the future are assembled on a mechanized conveyer belt).

me: (still watching people zip past on the left) I feel like we're in one of those old Goofy cartoons where he demonstrates how not to do something. How Not to Use the Open Road Tolling System. We're him, stuck in a big studebaker that is slowly overheating, with one goofy foot hanging out the window and our hands laid down hard on the car horn. Then we look to the right and see a billboard that says our lanes won't be converted until 2007.

mr rampy: And the cartoon is set in 1955. And then the narrator says to have your change ready, so we're upside-down under the dashboard with our feet waving in the air.

me: Then we drive out of the shot onto an exit, to try to escape, and the camera pans to a sign that says that road will be completed later as well, and all you hear is our echoing "Yeeeaaaaooohhhuuuoooo!" as we plunge off the road.

We did some deadpan narration voiceovers too.