Toll Slavery

A few months ago I moved to Houston, TX and immediately became aware of the many toll roads that link the metropolis together. Fortunately, my most frequented destinations allowed relatively convenient travel on free roads and so I resisted the "need" to get the magnetic tracking device required for toll road travel. But one day after making a trip across town through 17 stop lights, I took a deep breath, and visited the nearest EZ Tag Store.

My wife complimented me for not complaining during the 45 minute ordeal. I even engaged in small talk with one of the eleven service reps and credited myself with helping replace her glum "I don't want to be here" attitude with a few smiles. My good attitude faded, however, immediately upon exiting the "store" and walking to the car; I felt compromised, like my freedom had been forcibly violated. After expressing the sentiment, my wife peaceably suggested, "Just try not to think about it; it's easier that way."

I had to think about it. While we took the same trip across town using toll roads and avoiding 12 of the 17 stop lights (35% red), I tried to calculate at each "zap zone" what the total cost was going to be. When we got home, I just couldn't be sure so I went online, spent ten minutes setting up my account, only to be greeted with: "Transactions may take several business days to post to your EZ TAG Account." What? An entirely automated, electronic system costing tens of millions of dollars has an unpredictable data delivery speed of days, not seconds? Do they purposely not want me to easily be able to keep track of my expenditures? I unrealistically vowed that I would avoid all toll roads unless it was a matter of life and death.

I was a fool. A few weeks later I was mapping a different trip across town, and after ten minutes of finding and then trying to understand the toll road map, I determined that I was either going to drive an extra 22 miles on the freeway or pay $7.90 in toll fees. Suddenly I remembered that I hadn't returned to my account to see what the last trip had cost me. After looking up the URL and being grateful that I had used my most common username and password when I had set up the account, I was incredulous to realize that I had spent $10.40 to avoid 8 red lights, not to mention the $15 spent to purchase the EZ Tag. Now it’s sounding like I’m a cheapskate.

I’m not. It’s about the difference between freedom and tolldom. The roads need to be paid for to be built and maintained, but what’s the most efficient way to collect these infrastructure dollars? The overhead costs already exist to operate the systems necessary to collect taxes, a portion of which funds are used to build and maintain roads. Creating an entirely separate overhead of hardware, software, signs, marketing material, operators, application takers, buildings, janitors, managers, executives, attorneys, accountants, fixed assets, IT personnel etc…is an unproductive and complete waste of time and money. Granted, if it costs less to collect tolls than it does to collect taxes, then maybe it would be logical to make EVERY road a toll road. However, by mixing the two collection systems, you pay for it once whether you use it or not, but if you want the “freedom” to use it (as the marketing material suggests), you pay for it again in order to cover the extra and unnecessary overhead.

Excess taxation (tolling) and wasted tax (toll) dollars is an insidious form of economic enslavement; it’s theft.