RALEIGH – Several North Carolina officials and lawmakers are moving forward with a proposal to convert Interstate 95 in Eastern North Carolina into a toll road. Expect the usual gnashing of teeth, complaints about motorists being double-charged, and warnings about the deleterious effects on the state’s all-important tourism industry.

Expect it, listen to it, and then ponder this simple question: if not tolls, what?

The proposal for I-95 is hardly some out-of-nowhere scheme to plant evil toll trolls up and down the road to pilfer cash from unsuspecting Tar Heels minding their own business. It is, rather, a response to the undeniable problem of a well-traveled highway transporting mostly non-North Carolinians at numbers far beyond its current capacity for safety and ease of travel. Our state desperately needs to do something, either widen the critical artery or build another one alongside it (the second alternative, believe it or not, may well be cheaper). If tolls aren’t going to be the funding source for this needed project, how it will be financed?

Should we raise the statewide tax on motor fuels or the statewide fee on automobile purchases? Both are key sources of revenue for the Department of Transportation. But both would involve compelling motorists who do not traverse I-95 – or consume significant quantities of products shipped along the interstate, since their price includes the cost of fuel – to finance the improvement of the road. Surely this is an unfair burden to impose in a state that already levies one of the highest gasoline taxes in the United States.

Should we fight to get back more of the federal excise taxes on gasoline paid by North Carolinians? Sure, but this has been an applause line in political speeches from Currituck to Cherokee for decades, and will likely remain so. History teaches that we shouldn’t expect some other layer of government to solve North Carolina’s problems, even if imposed from outside our borders. Like it or not, we are stuck with a list of worthwhile highways projects whose combined construction costs exceed the revenue we expect to collect at current tax rates.

Tolls aren’t taxes. That is, they bear a direct relationship to the service delivered while taxes bear only an indirect relationship, if any, to much one uses a service. Tolls are essentially a market mechanism, and are best thought of as part of a broader rethinking of how we make transportation policy. New technologies allow for electronic toll-collection, so many motorists will be able to avoid traffic snarls around the six planned toll booths along I-95. New organizational forms can and should allow private investors to participate in funding tollways. Sure, unlimited-access streets and highways will continue to be funded by taxes of one kind or another because it remains inefficient to charge their users directly. But for limited-access highways, interstates in particular, tolls are the right choice and should be seen as an alternative to taxing everyone to subsidize those who actually benefit from a government expenditure.

Fear not the toll trolls, in other words. It’s the tax trolls we should be worried about.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.