It's terrific that the $275 billion six-year U.S. House transportation bill passed last week puts $10 million toward construction of Interstate 73 between Myrtle Beach and the S.C.-N.C. line near Cheraw. But no one should pretend that this allocation is enough to cause construction to begin. The total cost of the project will run hundreds of millions of dollars.

That's why it's a darned good thing that the House bill and the Senate's highway bill, passed earlier this year, recommend that states use tolls to pay for new interstate projects. One hard political reality that federal lawmakers faced in putting the highway bills together is that there's no other way besides tolls to finance new projects. The political will to raise the federal gasoline tax beyond the current 18.5 cents per gallon - or even to index that tax for inflation - doesn't exist. In the past four decades, the federal tax has lost half its highway-financing power.

(Another hard reality they faced was a presidential veto threat for a highway bill costing more than $256 billion. The House and Senate bills both exceed that target big time. But because more than two-thirds of both houses voted for the bill - veto-proof margins - President Bush's objections may no longer be relevant.)

The bottom line for residents of the Interstate 73 corridor, then, is that $10 million may be the most we can expect the federal government to put toward I-73 during the next six years.

As The New York Times reported Sunday, the House and Senate broke with 182 years of tradition in countenancing tolls as the principal revenue stream for new highway projects - a view that Bush also endorses. But that by no means makes the imposition of tolls on new S.C. highways built in part with federal money a slam dunk.

South Carolinians passionately hate toll roads and bridges - as evidenced by the furor evoked in the mid-1990s by the proposal to finance part of the cost of the new Ravenel Bridge over the Cooper River between Charleston and Mount Pleasant with tolls. This attitude stems from South Carolinians' innate populist view of public finance. An attitude change may be in order, however, because the S.C. General Assembly appears to lack the political will to raise the state's gasoline tax beyond its current level, 16 cents per gallon.

S.C. lawmakers love the Grand Strand's demonstrated ability to raise tax money for state programs, which an interstate link would increase. They say they want to revive the hardscrabble economies of the high-unemployment Pee Dee counties along the proposed I-73 route. But will they approve tolls to move I-73 from concept to reality?

Like the rest of us, Grand Strand business and political leaders don't much like the idea of tolls. But they have endorsed tolls for I-73 because they know the highway probably won't get built without them. Their challenge now is to prepare the political environment here and in Columbia for a sustained assault on this critical strategic objective. To do less is to risk delaying I-73 for a generation, maybe more.