Wrong turn

Not that PajamaGuy is about to start promoting taxes, but the gas tax is nearly a perfect one. It generally pays the costs of what it is collected for, and those costs closely correlate to usage.

Its major weakness is that it still leaves to the political process the allocation of construction: Someone has to decide what roads to build.

So, the idea of switching from gas tax to tolls is an improvement. And with today's technology, it would be trivially easy. "Easy Pass" road sensors are fine as they are, but they could be improved even more and made cheaper. You could buy an anonymous toll-bucket at every gas station and convenience store, just as you buy anonymous gas, batteries, phone cards and tanks of propane for your grill. Mount the bucket in a standard place in your trunk or under the hood, and a nickel gets deducted for every mile you drive, or $4 for the Throgs Neck Bridge.

Easy. Sensible. Pays the costs, without the politics.

So what do governments do? Well, first thing is they're worried about revenue, not the cost of the service. And the second thing is they propose an outrageous invasion of privacy. Instead of anonymous payment, they want to track all your movements.

Five dollars to the first person who sends in some bureaucrat's denial that they'll use the data for anything else. $50 if the speaker is someone who has received money from Homeland Security.