They are surrounded by more bus lanes, picked on by more traffic wardens, spied on by more speed cameras, punished with more fines and soaked more enthusiastically by the exchequer than ever before. Now, to cap it all, British drivers are threatened with a road-pricing system that would track their movements and bill them according to where they travel and when. So much for the freedom of the road.

The driving lobby suspects that the government would use road pricing to screw more money out of it, but it need not be that way. Combined with a reform of motoring taxes, road pricing could make life better, not worse. For drivers road pricing is an economist’s dream solution because it replaces a system that rations road use by queuing, which wastes people’s time, with one which rations it according to the value different drivers place on their journeys. And as demand varies, so can price: in cities at rush-hour prices can be set high; at night and in the countryside they can be kept low. Actually, the best way would be to introduce road pricing along with a reform of the inefficient system of taxing and investing in transport.

Road taxes should charge drivers for four sorts of damage they do: to road surfaces, to the climate, to other people’s health and to other drivers by creating jams. The two main current sorts of tax—fuel duty and vehicle excise duty (VED)—do not do that well. VED, an annual tax, penalizes some dirty cars, while fuel duty taxes people for burning up petrol, and thus for contributing to climate change. Neither tax, however, does much to discourage congestion, which wastes time and damages health.

Road prices, by contrast, could be set to take into account all those four sorts of damage. Charges would depend crucially on assumptions about the costs of economic damage; but according to one set of calculations, mid-range assumptions about climate change and pollution costs would lead drivers to pay about the same overall as they do at present. Rural drivers would pay less; urban ones would pay more but get around faster, so saving money in other ways.

At present, investments in the road system are based on awkward cost-benefit calculations. By charging for road use, the government would discover just what people were prepared to pay for. That would encourage private investment in roads, and might lead to a more rational system of allocating public investment in transport of all types.

The author’s attitude towards the road-pricing system is________.