The other day I was traveling through the Denver airport when I saw a sign that illustrates one benefit of toll roads.

The poster, hanging somewhere in Concourse B, featured a photo of, I presume, a father playing with his small child. The exact wording on the poster escapes my memory, but the message something like this: if  you’d rather spend your time with your loved ones than stuck in traffic, use the toll road.

The road, in this case, is E-470, one of the nation’s newest toll roads. The benefits to toll roads extend not only to time savings, however. They’re financially efficient.

When you purchase an automobile or gasoline, you pay a tax. Some of that money gets dumped into funds having nothing to do with roads. Some goes to fund mass transit projects that carry enormous price tags. (As the Buckeye Institute once pointed out about one transit project in Ohio, it would be cheaper to purchase leases on luxury SUVs than to fund the project.)

With a toll road, assuming the contract between the toll authority and the government is properly constructed, the funds spent on tolls go back into road maintenance. Granted, the contractor will take a profit, but that’s what makes the economy work. In any case, the money is not diverted into much less effective forms of transportation.