[lentulusgracchus]

Under those guidelines, tolls could only be charged on roads where travelers were given the option of using a parallel "free" road.

That's not the principle in play, where Rick Perry is doing tolling in Texas. From a TexDoT slide used in their own presentations concerning the NAFTA Highway (NASCO Corridor, Trans-Texas Corridor), one of the ruling concepts of tolling is that for the tolled asset to work, viable non-tolled alternatives -- competition -- has to be eliminated, in order to protect the revenue stream of the toll road operator.

And as a further matter of public record, the head squeeze at Texas DoT has been quoted on the subject of tolling as saying, and I quote, the future of Texas is "Toll roads, or slow roads, or no roads!!"

Nice, catchy, medieval-sounding little slogan, don't you think? You could almost do one of those "Dark Ages" Capital One commercials with that, couldn't you?

[Alberta's Child]

May be I'm wrong about this, but I've been under the impression that the toll road controversy in Texas involves roads that haven't even been built yet. If that's the case, then what's the big deal? Motorists can either pay for the new roads through their fuel taxes, or pay for the roads through the tolls. In either case, they're getting roads tomorrow that aren't there today.

It's also worth noting that tolling a highway on a major trade corridor makes a lot of sense for simple economic/operational reasons -- because it forces users who have both a start and end point outside the region to pay for their use of the system.