RALEIGH – One of the first policy papers published by the John Locke Foundation, back in 1991, concluded that North Carolina should use new approaches such as toll roads, public-private partnerships, and congestion pricing to expand the state’s highway system in a cost-effective manner.

As it turned out, state lawmakers eventually embraced the notion of toll-road partnerships, and in fact the projects currently under consideration by the state are strikingly similar to several we listed as potential opportunities back in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, there’s been movement on the congestion-pricing front – specifically, plans to add what are called “high-occupancy toll”, or HOT, lanes to congested I-40 between Raleigh and Durham.

Perhaps the best-known champion of the HOT lane concept, already in place in several other states, is Robert Poole, an engineer with the Reason Foundation (of which he was a founder). Perhaps it isn’t surprising that Bob was also the author of that JLF paper years ago pitching similar ideas here in North Carolina.

The idea of paying for new highway capacity by charging users is hardly new. In fact, toll roads have been around for thousands of years, and in modern form they constituted much of the roadway capacity in America and Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries. But tollways have always had a collection problem. It was too costly to staff the roads enough to collect the fares and keep non-payers from using them. Also, government subsidies to railroads helped doom many toll roads to oblivion.

Actually, road transportation was never a major commercial artery or large-scale conveyance anywhere until the invention of the automobile (it was valuable to the military, however, which is why government provision of roads made some sense early on). Sea transport was much more economical.

The auto changed all that by doing two things simultaneously: 1) it make roads cost-effective compared with trains and boats, at least in some cases; and 2) it ameliorated the collection problem by enabling motorists to pay a user fee, via gasoline taxes, that bore at least a rough relationship to miles traveled.

During the first few decades of the auto age, tolls remained costly to collect, both in manpower and congestion. So it didn’t necessarily make sense for all limited-access highways to charge users directly. But now it does, since electronic toll collection allows roads to pay for themselves without slowing traffic or forcing most drivers to fish for change. Furthermore, electronic means allows for market-based congestion pricing to allow some drivers, if they wish, to pay a higher price for roadway when it is more valuable, much as utilities charge electric customers more during periods of peak demand.

When this option first became available, some politicians and activist groups railed against the notion of what they called “Lexus lanes.” Why should wealthier people be able to access a special lane that the rest of us can’t? Well, as a Governing cover story explains, these concerns are starting to ease, particularly as mass-transit boosters see market-based tolls as a way to discourage driving and to alleviate congestion for everyone on the highway, regardless of whether they use HOT lanes. it also turns out that people across the economic spectrum use the lanes.

Progress is a beautiful thing.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.