Down with Toll Roads

After 60 years of a no-toll-road federal policy, the Obama administration is backsliding.  They have been making noises that would allow states to put up toll booths on the interstate highways.  Obviously the attraction of squeezing more money out of the people overcame the very sensible principle of freeways rather than toll roads. 
   Travel means business, sales, and money.  It's good public policy to encourage travel and shipping.  Tourists bring money, and spend it, all along the way and at their destination.  Trucks bring every sort of good, which gets sold, for money.  The more goods shipped the more money everyone makes.  It was federal policy that freeways paid for themselves thru the increased business and economic activity.  Discouraging travel and shipping thru road tolls costs us more in lost business than it returns in tolls.
  Despite crying and wailing from the road contractors, US roads are in good shape, much better shape than say Canada.  I drove around the Gaspe peninsula in Quebec once.  It was a major road, a two lane provincial highway along the St Lawrence River.  Only it had washed away to the point that only one lane was left.  You don't see that in the US.  Except for some really beat up roads around New York City,  American roads are better than anywhere in Europe.  We do not have an "infrastructure crisis" except in the minds of state highway departments and road contractors.  Which has been used as an excuse to call for more money for "infrastructure".  Road tolls might provide this extra revenue.  So says the highway lobby.
  I say we ought to stick to the freeways rather than toll roads policy.