Yes! Tolls are making traffic in a lot of European cities a lot more manageable, and vastly improving air quality. Correctly pricing automobile travel is the only way we can offboard our cities from the insane externalities of single-occupant vehicles (not just air pollution, but all that valuable urban real estate wasted on parking spots and roads [0]).

[0] In normal times, 80% of commuters get to Manhattan via transit. ~1,500 rail passengers enter Manhattan’s central business district every six seconds between 8–9AM.

Trying to cram all those Manhattan-bound train riders into cars (or AVs) would be impossible. You’d need 324,000 more vehicles to accommodate them, and 100 new bridges or tunnels. [1]

[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2009/08/10/what-if-everyone-drov...

You're not asking to socialize the roads. You're asking to socialize the cost of the cars and the gasoline.

What is the problem with making all roads toll roads? If anything, the unseen costs of driving due to lack of tolls causes significant issues such as traffic, road wear and tear (resulting in pollution), and mid allocation of the public’s resources into infrastructure for private vehicles rather than public transportation.

Government is already reading license plates, might as well attach it to a billing system and charge people accordingly. Want to travel during high demand hours? Pay more. Watch businesses and people adjust their habits automatically to better use the shared resource.

And if the concern is that poorer people get shafted, then give them a certain amount of cash or credits for road usage.

Tolls were once difficult to enforce — collection infrastructure was expensive and slowed down traffic. Modern technology offers new ways forward, at the price of destroying privacy.

Or you could just impose a gasoline tax as a proxy for travel (oh hey that's exactly what they did.)

That works too, although if electric cars become mainstream, it would be an issue for the future.

It seems better to just tax something instead of setting up toll infrastructure

It really depends.

The free market is only efficient when transaction costs are low. For many forms of travel, the cost of monitoring such travel makes tracking far too expensive. Even just understanding a toll scheme has its own cost; you don't want to be too worried about misestimating the cost of every drive down to the grocery store.

For long-distance interstate travel, however, toll roads make a lot of sense. This is particularly the case where trucks are involved. You charge proportionally to axle weight, so the companies doing the shipping pay for the damage they are doing to the roads.

In other congested areas, tolls can serve as an effective form of rationing, particularly over bridges or through tunnels. This encourages more efficient resource usage, e.g. by making carpooling more worthwhile. This also makes more sense for city centers with congestion-charge fees. The alternative rationing scheme here, "sitting in traffic", is a very bad way to pay for things and imposes its own very high transaction costs.

A toll is a tax. Road usage isn’t equivalent, some roads are used more than others and at certain times. The goal would be to vary the tax based on demand, which is different for each road and time.

This already happens in many places, especially with tunnels and bridges.

> What is the problem with making all roads toll roads?

It's literally regressive.

Life is regressive. The only way to allocate resources efficiently is to charge what a thing costs to provide. (This often includes a modest accounting profit, consistent with the cost of capital, but never an outsized economic profit, consistent with rent seeking cronyism.)

If life is too hard for people with less money, society should decide how much money to give everyone to make it better, and then let them make their decisions -- instead of declaring, "Passenger Vehicle Traffic And Parking Lots Are Virtuous And Worth Subsidizing."

Sounds inefficient and complex to me to give people money just to take it away again. If you don't make people pay tolls you don't need to give them money to pay the tolls. Cover it all with income tax.

The problem is that when driving is free, people end up doing much more of it than is efficient. So instead of paying the congestion charge, you "pay" by sitting in traffic. Are you being responsible about resource usage and carpooling? Too bad, you still pay the exact same amount of delay. (HOV lanes do mitigate this, but only on those corridors where they're available.)

Meanwhile, the government generally ends up building too many roads and not enough transit. All this easily overwhelms the other inefficiencies.

Other bad plans where we don't charge for resources: Let's give all the people free electricity, so poor people don't have to pay something regressive! Then a few jerks can use it to mine Bitcoin until there are brownouts everywhere.

Road capacity is a limited resource. You can't just keep increasing income tax indefinitely to keep covering the ever increasing usage. The goal is to reduce usage, and/or time shift it.

So reduce taxes for poorer people. Or give them credits for tolls. The point is road usage isn't free, and pretending it is causes problems elsewhere.

having a car is a privilege, not a basic need. don't have a car? don't have to pay tolls.

norway has an interesting model which i don't agree with fully - new roads are toll roads until they pay for themselves. i guess support after that time is paid by fuel tax?

How do you get your food? Via someone transporting it in a vehicle? A vehicle on a road? Eating is not a privilege.

i've got a shop in walking distance.

someone transporting it in a vehicle is also an option which I very seldom use for groceries but almost everything else does come to my house this way.

access to shelter, food and water should be a basic human right. access to a car and it's supporting infrastructure shouldn't. consider what would have to happen to not need a car to get groceries instead of fueling the positive feedback loop of communities designed for cars and cars only. i've been to a development surrounded by a highway on all sides, you literally couldn't get out of it legally in any way which didn't involve a car. of course people jaywalked to walmart on the other side of one of the two-lane roads.

> i've got a shop in walking distance.

How do you think it gets to the shop?

No true Scotsman delivers it there.

You're not understanding my point - I'm saying the goods you buy have to travel by car to get to the stop you go to. So the road roll would increase food prices, which is a regressive thing to do.

I think the point is that most Americans get more out of roads than they do out of Air travel.

Yes, most roads should be toll roads. The benefits to society would be enormous.