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Re:$40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology by simonh on Thursday December 07, 2017 @03:21AM (#15868525)
Usually yes, but when one or a few suppliers are the sole source of a resource it’s not that simple. Especially when that resource is very widely used for a huge variety of applications. That’s becaus the benefit to society isn’t simple captured in the monetary cost.

Consider police vehicles, ambulances and utility maintenance vehicles. Does anybody really think they should have to pay tolls? A real market forces purist would say yes, but in reality passing along those costs efficiently isn’t practical. Similarly in theory all roads could be toll roads, but the cost of raising those tolls would massively increase the cost of the road infrastructure, driving up tolls in a vicious cycle. The gas tax is a reasonable compromise by taxing road use indirectly, it doesn’t capture the differing costs of different segments of roads and the demands on them, hence tolls on specific roads. So in the real world you can’t just treat everything like a nail and hit it with a market forces hammer. It’s a powerful and useful tool, one of the best we have, but still needs to be wielded responsibly with an eye to the intended outcome.

Re:$40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology by slededit on Thursday December 07, 2017 @04:15PM (#15874309)
While it varies there are toll bridges and roads where emergency vehicles must pay. It helps that they are electronic tolls where the vehicle does not have to stop.

Here's the infamous Tacoma Narrows Bridge as an example: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Even-police-cars-ambu...

Re:$40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology by londons_explore on Thursday December 07, 2017 @12:07PM (#15871759)
History has shown that in many cases, it's finding an efficient way to measure and charge for a resource which is the real breakthrough to utilizing the resource.

If the electricity meter hadn't been invented, or cost millions of dollars, it's doubtful your home would even have electricity today.

Re:$40 road tolls offer insight into commuter psychology by simonh on Thursday December 07, 2017 @05:41PM (#15875069)
Very true, but that’s a fact regardless of whether market forces are a send to determine price. Ideally they should, because markets are usually good at determining relative value, but not always as for example in the case of industrial pollution. Eventually over hundreds of years we are beginning to implement some ways of factoring that onto market costs, but it’s been a long and painful process and there’s still a long way to go. For most of that time direct regulation has been the only workable answer, figuring out how to factor it into markets would have been too late.