Privilege. This means it can legitimately be denied to you if you don't agree to do it the state's way. Nonsense. What would have happened if the British had tried to force the colonists to pay for "license brands" to be renewed yearly on their horses' rumps? What if they had been required to get "riding licenses" in order to ride a horse to town? More British enforcers would have been hanging from lamp posts and much sooner, that is what. What has happened to us? Why do we tolerate such obvious meddling? Driving is simply a modern extension of walking or horse riding. Nothing more; nothing less. Any claim about "higher technology" is meaningless. It makes as much sense as saying there is a right to "freedom of the press" as long as no technology invented after 1789 is used. Quills or 18th century printing presses are OK, but ball-point pens and computers are not, without a government permit. The technology increases, not diminishes, the safety. Should riding bareback be unregulated, yet if you use a saddle, you need a government permission slip? Is horseback riding so safe that no one ever dies? Hardly. Were the roads not "public" back then, so government couldn't lay claim to everything that touched them?
There is a right to travel (not a "right to trespass"), and it is not dependent on the method or technology used. Any government regulation, licensing, restriction, or obstruction (such as "check points") of this right is to be decried as the thrashings of a tyranny running out of time. Stop the highway bandits-with-badges.
