This cost is dominated by the production of the car and goes down almost linearly to something like $0.25/mi before maintenance would even be an issue.
This is cheaper than almost any other form of transport.
The road system is essentially free at this scale.
There are no significant subsidies that make this possible. It's just that cheap. And most of the cost is production – a positive-sum activity.
A congestion charge is a transfer payment (zero-sum). In general these should not be expected to significantly impact the value of civilization.
For one thing, the economy tends to route around them. A mortgage interest tax deduction causes house price inflation, for example. It's not clear there should be any long-run sensitivity of commuting times to commuting taxes. People are already paying their hourly wage to commute, and they will pay any tax on it also with that wage...
That said, I would say that congestion pricing could be a good thing for road building as it gives a value on building new ones. Hopefully the Boring Company can have some success and get tunneling prices down. Then with some idea of how much people will pay to not sit in traffic, we can get some tunnels built and start enjoying life again instead of sitting on congested freeways.
With enough high-speed tunnels one could convert all surface roads to max 25 mph mixed use and return the earth to the people like all those anti-car people dream of. Work for the win-win outcome.
I understand that you would rather pay x than 2x, but this is not “cultural freedom”, it is haggling over a price. But the fact that we ignore the $1 in wear on the drive belt because that won’t be a problem for three years, but we are annoyed about $1 to use a road right now, says a lot about human psychology.
Given climate change, and that sitting in traffic is not very nice, it seems a superior system to me to leverage psychology to bill at the point of use rather than squirreling the costs away in oil changes and in the fine print of financing paperwork and in making pedestrians walk longer between places through parking lots. It may be the case that transit is impractical for this route but the only real way to determine that is to have a functioning price mechanism. I mean it is probably faster to visit your family by helicopter, and helicopters do exist so there is a usecase for them. But we have the good sense to charge about what they cost.