Tolling as social therapy (EDITORIAL)

Tolling should be a simple service business, providing and maintaining a road for motorists in return for fees from users. It should be rather mundane, boring even. After all pavement is hardly the most exciting of mankind's artifacts, and its upkeep hardly more than a lot of chores.

But as anyone currently living in Boston MA, or Orlando FL or West Virginia knows the toll business is nothing like that.

Far from being one of many service businesses tolling is a form of public entertainment and scandal, a constantly giving source of fodder for us media exposers of wrongdoing and incompetence in high places.

For more ordinary citizens it's a therapeutic outlet for the perpetually indignant.

A public toll authority for these people is an assemblage of the most incompetent, the most perverse, and the most venal of persons.

It's something about which they can 'vent.'

In Boston there's widespread public support, it's clear, for legislation to "reform" and "reorganize" and "streamline" state transportation functions. No one really believes legislators have it in their power to do any of these things.

It's going to be a small boom in business for the signmakers, logo designers and such. A whole lot of stationery will be dumped, no, recycled. But noone believes the creation of a mega-agency will do anything but generate more layers of bureaucracy.

But they love it because it promises to abolish the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, which they hate.

Toll collection is not going to end of course. In fact abolition of the Turnpike Authority will certainly be predicated on major increases in tolls because the budgetary situation dictates that, and there's hardly a better time to make unpopular increases in tolls than for a brief period of happythink about Reform.

The question for Boston social therapists is - when the state toll authority is removed as the go-to punching bag where will all that anger out there be channeled? And what will we reporters do to find a story?

editor TOLLROADSnews 2009-04-24