In a general way, there are three major arguments against imposing a toll on the Sakonnet River Bridge between Portsmouth and Tiverton.

First, there never has been a toll on the bridge, and people in the area have structured their lives and businesses around an infrastructure that treated it as an undistinguished part of the local system of roads.  To those who’ve suggested that residents should have understood that the existence of a bridge meant that a toll was always a possibility, one might respond that the SRB is not much more of a bridge than just about any overpass in the state.  There is no glorious cable system or a giant arch through the sky; it’s a quick, straight shot from the mainland to an island.

Second, the toll does not represent a transition from an infrastructure strategy using general government revenue to a strategy relying on fees for use of particular pieces of infrastructure.  Rather, it’s an addition of user fees to an already high tax burden.  The probable hit of tens of millions of dollars to nearby taxpayers doesn’t come with any relief whatsoever in any other revenue source to government — local, state, or federal.

Third, even if one were to accept the “user fee” rationale, the toll is completely localized.  One isolated region of the state is having to cover the bill for key parts of its infrastructure while also paying the same share for the roads and bridges of the state overall.  This isn’t a considered restructuring of the way Rhode Island conducts its business; it’s another example of what we see when the General Assembly picks and chooses among new types of businesses to tax via licensing or sales taxes.

All of that said, though, the system should at least operate clearly and professionally.  There is no way to pay cash for the toll; there is no competing transponder system to E-ZPass; and the fees for the only other option, using a picture of vehicles’ license plates to send bills, will create a huge premium for bucking the Rhode Island Turnpike and Bridge Authority’s E-ZPass monopoly.

So how is a resident who isn’t happy with the service supposed to fire the provider?  I’d like to know because the invoice that I just received is disturbingly sloppy.

Just this week, I received a paper statement dated December 11, which purports to show account activity from August 1 to November 11.  What it actually shows is activity for the months of August and September, only.  To make matters worse, the invoice shows our household crossings in the order of when they were processed, which was done in batches, so the dates that we actually cross the bridge are bizarrely out of order.

A trip over the bridge to drop off the kids at their grandparents’ house can be processed on a different day than the trip, ten minutes later, in the other direction, separating the two crossings by a half a page.  In order to check what I’m being charged, I had to find the logs on the RITBA Web site (which ran through November), copy and paste them into Excel, sort by date and time, and create a pivot table.

Doing that, I discovered six times that the invoice listed the same trip twice (although it does not appear that I was charged twice).  I also found eight days that the car with the transponder crossed the bridge an odd number of times, only two of which can be explained (dropping off the car for repairs and picking it up the next day).

Then there are the two days that the car crossed the bridge eight times, the six days it was six times, and the 36 days it was four times.  All told, one of our vehicles incurred 272 tolls in the three-and-a-half months of online records.  (Our other car is the license-plate-photo experiment vehicle.)

Our family is surely not unusual, in the area, in having a tally like that.  By contrast, recalling all of the bridges with tolls in my experience, I can’t think of any that were likely to have many families crossing multiple times per day in one car.  I certainly can’t think of any that required drivers to put themselves entirely at the mercy of a quirky electronic system to which they’re being advised to give automatic credit-card access.