They already do pay their own way. Gas taxes, tolls, vehicle registration, emissions fees, license fees, premium taxes on car insurance, traffic tickets, parking tickets, parking meters, sales tax on the purchase of a car. Very few things in the United States are taxed as exhaustively as private vehicles.

I'm not sure when "subsidizing" came to mean "giving people something back for the money you took form them in the first place".

I'd love to see a less auto-dependent society, but it's not accurate to say that drivers are subsidized. Perhaps one answer would be to get rid these myriad taxes and fees and just privatize the highways - make it fee for use. Right now, very few drivers ever see the true cost of their transportation choices because it's a little bit here, a little there, and so on.

No, they do not:

https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/ &&

https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fees-pay-o...

Drivers are heavily subsidized.

Those are pretty interesting links. Thanks for sharing.

I wonder if there's any way to come up with a net value overall for those subsidies? For example, pre-K education is fully subsidized in some states and it looks like the total economic results over a long time are very positive. How would you go about figuring out if those road subsidies are too high or too low?

Good question, and a tough one.

You'd want to look at total benefits (easier movement of people and goods) vs total costs (environment, sedentary lifestyle health problems, wasted space in cities).

I am under the impression that gas taxes (which is the majority of the money you stated) considerably fails to cover the cost of building and maintaining the roads.