Nothing personal about your comment particularly - I agree with how you're characterizing it. I was reacting to the instant jump to political thought people wer

Nothing personal about your comment particularly - I agree with how you're characterizing it. I was reacting to the instant jump to political thought people were making when the PoA has plenty of interesting implications in the merely technological realm :) > By "standard", do you mean "every mile is taxed equally"? Or "according to construction/upkeep cost"? Perhaps confusing wording on my part - by standard I meant that the system that actually detects the car and charges the dollars and cents is standardized. In other words, a frictionless lingua franca for tolling that exerted negligible inconvenience on the driver as they were driving. Think "everybody has a Visa", not "every item costs $1". The tolls themselves would be priced neither uniformly nor "at cost" to offset construction expenses. Rather, they would simply be set to maximize profit for the local municipality that owned the tolling machines. Pricing the edges to maximize profit minimizes congestion, and theoretically does exactly as well as a super-deity oracle with perfect information that could plan everybody's route from start to finish. (This perhaps counterintuitive result is described in ref 2 from the grandparent). Whatever money is made in aggregate is used for all repairs and maintenance, so the idea is that small back roads would help to subsidize the cost of bridges, which are disproportionately expensive to repair compared to their importance in the road network. More importantly, the price to drive on any road is directly reflective of the externality you impose while driving on it. Right now, the expense and complication of exacting the toll is high enough that we only extract tolls at critical points like bridges, which means we only use tolls to discourage congestion in these few places. We set the tolls too high there to offset the fact that there should be tolls on feeder streets and other areas that are getting backed up and contributing to the overall gridlock. In practice, you'd have to get around some issues surrounding the advertisement of road prices to the driver. The system would have to strike a balance between being fair and fatiguing drivers with too much shopping choice. In this respect, perhaps you could be right that there is some idealized thinking going on. But it is just an idea, after all.