Smart Tolls?

Maryland’s Gov Parris ‘Smartgrowth’ Glendening has foreshadowed an old idea – get-em-at-the-border – in which Maryland’s tolls will be heavily hiked at the borders [on the Susquehanna River near Delaware in the northeast (I-95 and US-40), and on US-301 near Virginia in the south] while politically more contentious tolls on the Baltimore harbor crossings and on the Chesapeake Bay bridge will be left the way they are. Glendening wants to raise more revenue for transit, so his Smart Tolls policy consists of “sock ‘em fuhrnas” (Maryland redneck lingo usually preceded by the other F-word.)

Gov Glendening’s move is in the great 17th and 17/18th century tradition of the petty dukedoms. Little city-states and principalities of central Europe where the local Lord, Count or Archduke in what is now Germany, Austria, Switzerland or Hungary used his monopoly control over a mountain pass or river crossing or simply a border post to extract huge profits from travelers and traders in the name of a toll to pass.

Indeed some say German unification under Otto von Bismark in the 1870s – what horrors that led to! – was propelled in part by popular anger at the exploitative tolls imposed by the petty aristocacy on travelers. Archduke Glendening, welcome to the 17th century!