Column for August 5, 2010

My family and I just returned from a wonderful two-week vacation in New England. It probably went better than most any vacation I have taken to date. There were still so many things left on my list of possible activities that we still have plenty of activities left for our next vacation.

The only bad part of the trip was the trip itself. In my 23 years of driving from North Carolina to New Hampshire and back, this was possibly the worst travel I have experienced. I continuously kept thinking to myself "I hope that North Carolina does not end up like this".

I know that each trip up or down the eastern seaboard, I am going to be hit with frequent tolls. I figured from experience that I will have to pay between $20 and $30 in tolls each way if I was going to take what is usually the most expedient route. The total was somewhere down the middle, at about $25 or so.

Some tolls were only a dollar or two. Some were $5 or over $9, depending upon where it was. The most expensive stretch of highway in the United States has to be through Delaware. In all, Interstate 95 goes through Delaware for about thirteen miles. Delaware is a small state, after all. I paid $4 on one end and $3 on the other end. That makes the toll rate about 54 cents per mile to travel through that tiny state.

Let's face the fact about highway tolls. Tolls are nothing but another form of taxation. Some may call them user fees, but they are taxes nonetheless. Ostensibly, tolls are enacted to help with highway maintenance and construction. Of course we all know how that concept works. North Carolina has raided the highway trust fund for use in the general fund. The Social Security trust fund was raided long ago to add to the US Treasury's general fund. I have no doubt that the North Carolina lottery trust fund will eventually end up as part of the NC general fund.

I can not remember in my 23 years of traveling up to New England a trip without some sort of construction going on in Connecticut along the interstate. This trip it took one hour to move four miles. On one of the busiest sections of American highway, I-95 coming out of New York City and through Connecticut, evening construction brought three lanes down to only one. Planning lane closures like that should be a capital offense.

The sad thing about it is that there are signs posted about how my tax dollars are helping fund that construction through the so-called stimulus spending under the Obama administration. Not only did I get to pay for tolls and taxed that way, I got to be taxed through federal income tax to help pay for inconvenient, incessant construction. In fact, federal dollars go into just about every stretch of major highway, so tolls are double taxation, even for non-residents of the state in question.

I saw more stimulus signage for paving projects in Massachusetts on roads that were already in excellent condition. I was wondering why they were in the middle of paving a perfectly good stretch of interstate.

While stuck in southern Connecticut, all I could think about is how every doggone trip that direction I run across construction in that state and how it reminds me of I-40 through Research Triangle Park. The construction there seems to have been going on for twenty years.

While sitting in lines at various tollbooths, especially without an E-Z Pass account since I don't normally encounter tolls in NC, all I could think of is that North Carolina wants to put toll booths on I-95 at our northern and southern borders. I-95 is indeed one of the most traveled corridors in all of America. Putting tollbooths along the interstate would certainly bring in revenue and soon recover booth construction costs. However, it is not a matter of finding more revenue, it is a matter of spending more than we take in as a state.

Tollbooths being nothing more than another form of taxation, I am just glad that I don't frequently travel either north or south of the NC border should we get them. But wait! North Carolina is also talking about putting tollbooths on the new outer loop of I-540 in Raleigh. If we give an inch for a tollbooth, we are going to end up having many miles taken from us, as well as dollar bills. And the insult to us taxpayers is that we will be taxed for the implementation and construction of the new taxation system and its maintenance.