Coming Soon to a Freeway Near You

A year ago Florida introduced cashless toll roads. Cameras arranged above the toll ways photograph passing vehicles’ license plates. In due time the auto’s owner gets a bill for the toll charge. The system is at present limited to the Miami/Dade region and south, including the only convenient freeway that gives access to the Florida Keys. As best as I can make out, the only other state that “offers” this new convenience is Texas—but I understand that Missouri is pondering such a scheme as well. Progress, progress.

Here the consequences of a political culture where cutting taxes has taken on the rudiments of a new religion. Just ponder the benefits. Foremost among these, from the states’ point of vantage, is that people employed in collecting tolls at booths may be laid off; in the construction of new toll ways, toll booth construction may also be avoided—although mounting metallic structures to hold the cameras will be a new cost. No people needed. Lenses and computers do the whole job.

What this portends is that, ultimately, all roads will turn into toll roads once cities catch up with the states. As technology makes yet another leap, it may also be possible, perhaps, to measure the intake of air by people breathing as they walk on public thoroughfares, like sidewalks, and air intake will then be tolled next. That, of course, will generate additional exciting industries such as breathing masks with little tanks, the oxygen inside them priced just a mill or so below the cost of the cashless air toll of the future.

Ain’t it grand to be living in our hi-tech times?

Texas as a Country

If Texas were a country rather than merely a state (it was a country once, 1836-1845), it would fit between Nepal and Afghanistan. In the tabulation that follows, I show other comparative figures.

	Population	GDP (in $ billions)	Per capita income ($)	Land Area (square miles)	Water as % of land area	Density (people per sq.m)
Nepal	26,840,935	35.813	1,270	56,827	2.80	199.3
Texas	25,674,681	597.041	37,706	268,581	2.50	98.1
Afghanistan	24,485,500	30.012	966	251,772	negl.	43.5

When we left Europe aboard the U.S.S. Muir as post-war migrants to America, the ship headed for New Orleans rather than, as usually, for New York. The reason was that our destination was to be Texas—not Missouri, where we actually ended up. The reason for the change? The man who was our “sponsor” died while we were on the Atlantic, and his son declined to honor that pledge; in effect it amounted to giving my father a job. We were able to find a new/old friend in Kansas City; she was also an emigrant; we’d known her in Europe. So we made the long trip by train to KC rather than some town in Texas the name of which is now lost.

I’ve often wondered what would have happened—how our lives might have been shaped—had we ended up Texans. Compared to its two “neighbors” in population size, Texas is the richest and in land area the largest. It is more densely settled than Afghanistan—indeed than the United States as a whole (87.4 persons/square mile)—and it does have a little water. The state’s motto is simply Friendship. In Missouri we had to remember our Latin to figure out the motto there: Salus populi suprema lex esto. Nicely ambiguous word that, salus. The founders certainly meant the welfare—of the people. But it could also be translated as salvation. Friendship, however, is what we feel for Texas.