For two years now, a task force of Utah legislators has been trying to figure out how to pay for the $23 billion in additional transportation work the experts, and the traffic jams, say we need. The recommendations, to be finalized Wednesday for presentation to the 2005 session of the Legislature, involve a mixture of new taxes and redirected spending that is about as unpleasant as it is necessary.

If there is any apparent shortcoming to the proposals, it is that they do not do enough to curb demand for more high-cost, high-maintenance cement by shifting more of the financial burden to commuters and the sprawling developments that create them.

It certainly makes some sense to, as the Transportation Planning Task Force recommends, devote the sales taxes collected on the sales of autos, auto parts and related goods to highways. Or it would make sense, if the rest of the state budget weren't just as tight as the transportation part.

Taking some $2.3 billion over 10 years away from education, law enforcement, social services and putting it toward highways tips the balance toward an excessive subsidy, not just of highways, but also of urban sprawl.

The task force calls for increases in fuel taxes (5 cents a gallon now, indexed to inflation later), vehicle registration fees ($9 for cars, 10 percent for trucks) and a new transportation-devoted sales tax (a quarter-cent). But it treads gingerly around the idea of toll roads, basically reserving the idea for new routes (Legacy Highway?) or special added lanes on existing highways.

Toll roads belong in the mix. They could shift some of the cost to pass-through traffic that may otherwise pay no more than one tank's worth of gas tax. And frustrated commuters should be eager to pay reasonable tolls in exchange for less travel time, especially tolls that could be electronically billed and offered at a bulk-buy discount rate similar to the reduced fares UTA riders get by buying monthly passes.

Another option that so far seems too obvious to be considered is that of charging impact fees on the developers of new office parks, shopping centers and housing subdivisions.

Those are the generators of the huge traffic flows that fill our highways with slow-moving cars just as fast as we can build them. It would not be at all unfair to expect them to share the cost.

And, if that added expense would slow such development down, that would be by far the cheapest way to address crowded highways.