Is it just me? When driving back home from out of state, I can always tell when I get back to Louisiana-when my car begins to shake as if its coming apart. Louisiana has been known for many things, but never for good roads.

The reason is not that we don't pay for good roads. We do. We just do not get our money's worth. Sometimes we seem to get nothing.

I have written several columns now on taxation. Some ways of raising funds for the government are better for its citizens than others. Sometimes, the use of the tax funds plays a role in determining what type of tax is best. Perhaps one of the best tax-and-spend combinations is a state gasoline tax to pay for roads.

We all use roads, either when we drive on them ourselves or when we buy things such as our groceries that have been transported over roads. While we can pay for some limited access roads (interstate-type highways) with tolls, which amounts to paying a direct price for use of the road, we can not place tolls on all of our roads. A gas tax gets those who use the roads the most to pay the most by making us pay for something we must use to use the roads, gasoline or diesel.

In 1989, voters of Louisiana approved an extra four cents on each gallon of gasoline pumped in the state to pay for a slate of transportation projects around the state, including 400 miles of four-lane highways, bridge construction and upgrades, and improvements for the port and airport in New Orleans. The program is called the Transportation Infrastructure Model for Economic Development and is known as TIME. At the same time all of the fuel taxes in the state were constitutionally dedicated to transportation infrastructure.

Since 1989, only three TIME projects have been completed, all in New Orleans. We have seen about a three-mile stretch of Highway 90 completed, but the rest of the Highway 90 between Houma and Morgan City does not look as if it will be open any time soon. Baton Rouge constantly has work going on all of the time.

The real question is "where are the roads we were promised?" It seems as if the folks in the Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD) are forever engineering and re-engineering the roads, planning and more planning, without ever actually getting around to the business of building roads. And when they do get a road built, something seems to go wrong.

I don't think that we should abandon this program. We still need roads to be built, to be finished. We all know Louisiana roads could be much better.

In ordinary transactions, when one side fails to keep their word, when they do not fulfill their side of the contract, the other side takes them to court or at least stops trading with them. Unlike the charges of monopoly made against Bill Gates and Microsoft, we face a real monopoly problem with the Louisiana DOTD. Who can we turn to? If we repeal the four cent tax on gasoline, we get no roads. If we continue to pay the tax, we pour money down a drain, wasted. We probably cannot even replace all of the folks in the DOTD because of civil service regulations (it is almost as hard to get rid of a civil service employee as a tenured professor).

We have very few options. What I think we should think about in this state is to privatize the whole DOTD. Surely, hiring private firms that are fully bonded to oversee transportation spending in Louisiana could be no worse than what we now have. If you think that privatization of DOTD activities is too risky there is something else we could do. We could pay Mississippi's transportation department to manage our transportation infrastructure! Could they do any worse?