Finally, lawmakers are throwing money at mass transit.

When I was covering the Florida Legislature, back in the 1980s, I once listened in on a Senate debate over whether to provide state subsidies for local transit systems.

One lawmaker took to the floor and said that for what they were being asked to spend on buses, they could buy cars for all the transit riders.

That the whole point of having mass transit is to get people out of their cars seemed an alien concept indeed.

So as a longtime Tallahassee-watcher, I'm stunned that the Legislature is on the verge of paying $400 million to $600 million to CSX railroad for 61 miles of track for a commuter rail in and out of Orlando.

Lawmakers are finally throwing money at mass transit. Gee, you would think that for that kind of money, they could just buy cars for everybody and have done with it.

And that's not all. This week members of the "We hate taxes so much we could spit" Florida House unanimously approved a bill that would allocate a $2 surcharge on rental cars to fund three metro regional transit authorities.

That's right, taxing cars to pay for buses and trains.

And even that's not all. While the state looks at leasing or selling Alligator Alley to a private company, authorization is quietly moving through the Legislature to hike tolls on the Florida Turnpike by 25 percent.

So while Gov. Charlie Crist wants to suspend the state gasoline tax this summer to save motorists pennies per gallon, his administration intends to privatize roads and jack up turnpike tolls by dollars as a revenue generator.

What's going on? Well, nobody in Tallahassee wants to come right out and say it out loud, but the politicians are trying to tell us something. Two things, really.

One: That driving is going to get more expensive in Florida. It's as inevitable as the upward creep in gas prices.

And two: That Florida, which is heavily dependent on growth for its economic wellbeing, is fast approaching the point where traffic gridlock threatens to bring growth to a screeching halt in many metro areas.

Nobody's even pretending anymore that it's possible to build our way out of gridlock. The only alternative is to convince commuters to get on the bus, or on the train as it were, because driving costs too much and congestion isn't going to go away.

And frankly, that message is way overdue, even if the politicians are shy about coming right out and saying it.

Leasing public highways? Motorists may have a visceral reaction against privatizing public roads, but the economists have a phrase for it: "Road pricing."

Simply put, it means placing a market value on a scarce commodity (road lanes) and then letting the market sort out the supply and demand issues.

Chris Zimmerman, an economist and a member of a Washington, D.C.-area metro transportation board, recently put it this way in a Washington Post piece: "If the price of bread were zero, you wouldn't find bread on the shelves." The notion that roads are "free" similarly encourages driving gluttony.

That's why London, Singapore and Stockholm have adopted "congestion pricing" systems that charge motorists premium rates for driving into their central districts. The fees support mass transit, and commuters have the option of riding cheaply rather than driving dearly.

New York City tried this year to adopt a similar congestion pricing system that would have charged motorists $8 to drive into the heart of the Big Apple. But the state Legislature thought it was some kind of a communist plot and killed it.

It's not a communist plot, it's the wave of the future. A future in which oil is only going to get more expensive and congestion more intractable.

Here on the home front, Alachua County commissioners are moving toward approval of Newberry Village, a controversial mixed use development on Newberry Road, on the developer's pledge to help pay for a bus rapid transit system.

A lot of residents along Newberry oppose the development, arguing that it will only add traffic to an already overburdened road, and that few suburbanites will be willing to ride the bus; even one that has the ability to move more quickly by controlling traffic signals and perhaps using dedicated lanes.

But you have to ask yourself, what's the alternative? Sitting in traffic for ever longer periods and burning ever more expensive gas?

There are no easy solutions to our transportation problems. If there were, the pols would have rolled them out by now. They are throwing money at mass transit and moving toward road pricing precisely because there are no politically popular alternatives.

Heck, we could buy everybody cars and abolish the gas tax, if that would do the trick. But when even the politicians in Tallahassee stop fooling themselves about the inevitable consequences of our auto-centric policies, it may be time for the rest of us to get aboard the reality train as well.

Ron Cunningham is editorial page editor of The Sun. He can be reached at voice@gvillesun.com or at 352-374-5075. Read his blog, Under The Sun, at www.gainesvillesun.com/opinion.