FEATURE: “In China, It’s Not Always Clear for Whom the Booth Tolls,” by Jim Yardly, New York Times, 16 May 2007, p. A4.

Story is about the patchwork of tolls around China, which sound a bit feudal in their localism.

More interesting to me is the factoid buried within:

By 2020, if all goes as planned, China will have completed roughly 53,000 miles of expressways, a network roughly equivalent to the Interstate System in the United States. China considers expressways crucial to maintaining its economic growth and developing its western and interior provinces.

But since China’s trying to finance so much of it with tolls, it’s running into a lot of popular avoidance behavior--go figure.

That won’t stop until the differential in time lost is seen as so great as to justify the cost, and that will be an interesting process to watch.