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Highway Robbery: Bad Road Stops
The Travel Critic · November 23, 1999

With the busiest of all travel holidays looming, spare a thought for those of us who will be trapped in the maze of fast-food joints and pricey gas pumps that prey on travelers.

Spare a thought for those of us stuck at one of the strategically placed, impossible-to-ignore highway rest stops this Thanksgiving. Horror stories about the way stations abound. Let's start with the gasoline prices. Depending on where you are, they can be seriously inflated. At a "Last Chance for Gas!" rest area in West Texas, I once paid nearly 20 cents a gallon more than the going rate.

Then there's the food, if you want to be generous enough to call it such. What a pleasure it is to pay about $4 to use an overcrowded road on which your only dining option is hot dogs and wretched wedge-cut fries. I mean, what if you don't like hot dogs? "I can't get a good cup of coffee at any of the rest stops, and the restrooms could be cleaner," complains Alan Grate, a Rocky Hill, Conn., business consultant.

Don't even start on the bathrooms. But since he brought it up, what's with them? With all the money they're making from tolls, doesn't the state government have a little room on the budget for someone to clean the stalls? Maybe even build a few new stalls for those facilities that are being used to capacity?

Larry Jansch knows the importance of clean and readily available restrooms. The Dallas consultant often, as a child, traveled from Long Island to Pennsylvania. "Once on the normally three-hour drive, the five of us stopped at every rest stop on the New Jersey and Pennsylvania turnpikes because our bladders got all out of sync," he recalls. "The trip took five hours. The rest stops were always very crowded and food used to be fairly horrid."

Turns out those premium prices you're paying theoretically go toward keeping the restrooms clean.

In most cases, the vendors who operate the food facilities have a contract that sets menu items a price slightly higher than local rates. The extra charge is for covering maintenance costs, explains Michelle Martineau Green, a spokeswoman for Host Marriott, which manages food services on the New Jersey Turnpike. "The cost is different because we're also responsible for cleaning the restrooms and keeping the facility clean." she says.

These are, of course, worse things that can happen at a rest area than eating bad food, drinking a bad cup of coffee or getting ripped off when you buy gas. You could die. When a German tourist was murdered at a Florida rest area a few years ago, the state responded by posting 24-hour security guards at the stations - but not before the oases of substandard food and facilities had been cast as a dangerous hangout for violent criminals.

The American Automobile Association followed up the killing with a list of suggestions for motorists concerned with safety. Most of the tips were commonsense ideas, such as "plan ahead" and "do not pick up hitchhikers." Others were beyond obvious: "keep a full tank of gas" and "keep your vehicle in good mechanical condition."

Rest areas are about as regulated as hotels, which is to say they aren't regulated very much. There are no federal rules that govern security or facilities the way there are on a plane.

Most of the rest stops are run by states, with some funds provided by the federal government. Uncle Sam offers broad guidelines for the administration of the facilities - for instance, which amenities a rest area should include or how food can be sold - but it generally leaves the rest to the states.

I'm not saying these rest areas should be regulated any tighter or, God forbid, dismantled. We need these places, deeply flawed as they are, when we travel.

I am saying that the folks running these stations shouldn't exploit their geographic advantage. They shouldn't overcharge us for food and fuel just because they're the only store for miles. Many airport vendors have experimented with what are called "street prices" - charging the same rates for goods and services that you'd pay outside the airport. Maybe it's time to try that at these rest areas.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.