North Carolinians will come to rue July 30, 2009.

That’s the day that the N.C. Turnpike Authority began spending a billion-plus dollars of borrowed money to build the state’s first modern toll road.

The 18.8-mile turnpike will cut through western Wake and southern Durham counties, providing a second, outer beltline around Raleigh and easing traffic to busy Research Triangle Park.

A debate on whether the road is needed is for another day. The problem with the highway is that it takes North Carolina into the inequitable and wasteful toll-road business.

Highway planners say they’ve solved the traffic-related problems associated with toll roads. There will be no toll booths, so motorists will not have to stop and drop their quarters. Traffic should flow and dangerous back-ups should be avoided.

The authority will collect tolls electronically. Motorists will secure transponders that signal their presence. Later, the authority will bill them by mail or deduct the toll from an existing account balance. The authority will photograph the license plates of vehicles without transponders and bill these drivers by mail.
Therein lies the first problem with toll roads: the cost of collecting revenue. Neither the administrators nor the equipment needed to operate the billing system will be cheap.

Who will do all of this work? The turnpike authority’s bureaucracy, of course. The tolls will pay for more administrators and employees who will join the current staff. And with the new bureaucracy will come all of the things on which bureaucracies waste money – press spokesmen, junkets to conferences in San Diego, etc.

Compare this with the alternative to tolls: an increase in an existing tax or fee, most likely the gas tax. The same $1 billion in construction money could be raised without requiring any new employees. There’d be no additional costs to collect the money. All of the taxes and fees North Carolinians paid would go straight to the project.

A higher tax would also be fairer. As it stands, the people who use this new turnpike will be paying all of the existing transportation taxes and the toll on top of that. People living elsewhere will not pay extra to use their roads to get to work.

Why should the rest of us care if we aren’t using this road? Because more toll roads are coming. And when they land in our backyard, we will be double-taxed while others never are. That is simply unfair, and over the years it will breed discontent in North Carolina just as it has in many other toll-road-reliant states.