Polls, don’t you love them? There are so many ways that polls can be done badly.

Like this one cited in the WSJ, with a great revelation: people think it’s important to spend money on transport, but they don’t want gas taxes, either. And it would be ok if more private investment went into transport.

Awesome with awesome sauce on top.

This popularity of private funding raised for transportation infrastructure can be seen the universal love that people have for paying tolls and parking charges, and the long history of extremely successful private franchising arrangements we’ve had.

Not.

Maybe we should try to start our very own philanthropic organization: Fill a Pothole for Humanity. We could have sincere-looking spokespeople come on, in between the miserable child and miserable animal charity commercials, and talk in urgent terms about how swell it would be if you were to voluntarily send in your money right now, if you feel like it, in your spare time between driving too much and using inefficient vehicles while worrying about US national security policy.

Just so long as nobody is actually expected to pay for stuff they use.

Edited to add: Columbia’s David King writes that the pothole charity idea has been tried in Germany.