They possess a playful attitude about their work. It's often annoying and effete. But they love their toys. So let's build them the biggest toy in the country. Basically, the theory is that roads are used inefficiently since they don't have explicit prices.
People continue to enter a highway until it jams with congestion.
Building more unpriced roads simply leads to more congestion. Toll roads are an old-fashioned and indirect way of dealing with this, but toll booths are slow, and fixed tolls miss the opportunity to use the prices to manage congestion. However, E-Z passes demonstrate how far the technology and our attitudes have come. With that little box, you can now have tolls deducted from an account you settle monthly. But the real payoff to road pricing comes from two things that no American city has implemented yet.