At 9 a.m. every weekday morning, cars with Maryland tags come gliding around the half-moon of Chevy Chase circle and head south down Connecticut Avenue toward the marble and glass offices of the capital city.

From Virginia, they cross Potomac River bridges; from the east they cruise along New York Avenue; from the south, it’s over the Anacostia River. Millions of commuters in hundreds of thousands of cars swell our population every day. A few District politicians see dollar signs.

Three council members — Kwame Brown, Harry Thomas Jr. and Marion Barry — have introduced legislation to study the idea of creating a toll system to charge commuters who want to cross the D.C. line.

Crazy, you say. Just another gimmick to squeeze the suburbanites, you think. A phantom toll booth masquerading as a commuter tax. Never going to get off the ground.

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“It’s a good idea,” says Natwar Gandhi, the city’s chief financial officer and reigning fiscal wise man. “It should be studied.”

Says Ward 2 Council Member Jack Evans, chairman of the Finance and Revenue Committee: “I’m looking at the possibility of holding a hearing on the bill. I would expand it to see how we could capture more revenue from commuters. The District of Columbia continues to subsidize two of the richest counties in America.”

That would be Fairfax County, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland. By Evans’ accounting, commuters avail themselves of city services but pay no taxes to keep up the streets and bridges, let alone pay for cops and firefighters.

This reasoning — a slippery slope toward a commuter tax — is a surefire political winner in D.C. “Stick it to the suburbs” will translate directly into votes for Marion Barry and Harry Thomas. Both represent working-class wards on the city’s east and south sides. Kwame Brown, who serves at-large, can harvest votes citywide.

But there’s more than pure politics at play here. Cities across the globe have erected toll systems to reduce congestion and increase revenues.

London Mayor Ken Livingstone established a toll system in 2003. The complicated system is designed to charge cars different rates at different times and places. A few months ago, London jacked up the rate to $16 a day for some vehicles.

Singapore has the most simple and successful system: Its “tag and beacon” system automatically charges cars and adjusts to congestion.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg this month proposed a “greener” Manhattan plan that would charge cars $8 and trucks $21 to enter center city “congestion zones.”

Every D.C. politician — from Evans to Gandhi and even to Barry — knows the end game of any proposal that attempts to tax commuters. Enacting such a tax would require a change in the Home Rule Charter and face a certain death in Congress.

Like it or not, paying a premium to use certain roads is coming. Once tolls get established for fast lanes on the Capital Beltway, the idea of paying a toll to enter the city might be right around the corner.

Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at hjaffe@washingtonian.com.