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Expect to hear similarly cautious responses from other office-holders. They know that people are used to driving the roads for “free.” And whenever people are used to getting something for “free” they react badly to any suggestion that they should begin paying for it.

Only what comes out of their mouth is not “I don’t want to pay for something I’ve been used to getting for free” or even “this is new and I hate new things.” It’s “affordability.” I suspect this is a rationalization, and the reason I say so is that there’s nothing new about it.

It is not new, for starters, to charge for things. We may not price roads, but we price nearly everything else in the economy: for example, food. Generally we recognize that affordability is a problem of income, not prices. If we are worried whether people can afford X or Y, the answer we most often choose is to give them the money to buy it, rather than suppress prices. Because in the absence of prices, demand overwhelms supply. Thank goodness we price food, or the result would be breadlines.

Yet point out that a similar consequence has in fact followed from our failure to price roads — the delays and congestion that are everywhere in our major cities — and the instant objection is “affordability.” Never mind that the only people for whom the cost of road pricing would be an issue are those who can afford to buy a car.