Charging money for access to transportation is very politically biased: people with low or no income are effectively denied transportation while people with high income are not discouraged. This is how slums are created.

> If someone knows of a different solution, I'd like to know

Some cities have areas that allow unlimited access to locals and deliveries and limited access to others (X times per year)

Are people entitled to free roads? If yes then the electorate will not care that fuel taxes and registration fees don't cover road maintenance costs - it's a dignity not a price. If not then all roads should be toll roads or cars can be taxed per mile via odometer readings.

Making things free at the point of use is not always the best way to help the poor or public. The inefficiency of no charge first come first serve could outweigh equity benefits. Having everyone pay in time (traffic jams) is a large hidden cost. Time is valuable even for those who lack money. The US Department of Transportation came up with a benchmark of $12.25/hour (50% of median household income) to evaluate the expected time savings of proposed transportation projects (2014).

With free roads only time, fuel, and vehicle depreciation are considered. Roads are considered zero cost. There's minimal consideration of mass transit, carpooling, or moving closer to work. Just demands to add another lane and more parking everywhere. If roads were tolled or a lane was re-allocated to buses that could help poor people by making carpooling or riding a bus a realistic lower cost alternative to owning a car (or second car). Carpooling is a great example of how tolls incentivize high efficiency: 2 coworkers coming from the same neighborhood can cut their vehicle ownership expenses, the toll only hits half as hard, the people/hour throughput of the road goes up, and they take up less parking. Two people get to avoid congestion doubling time savings.

Infrastructure is always shared. There are hard normative questions about how capacity should be allocated, and who should be subsidized. Making it free at the point of use doesn't eliminate those trade off questions.

I don't understand what point you are trying to make.

> If not then all roads should be toll roads or cars can be taxed per mile via odometer readings

...or you tax the combination of car usage and fuel efficiency by taxing fuel consumption. Which is already done with steep taxes on fuel sale in some countries and it's discouraging car use. For some people.

Charging for road use is not necessarily anti-poor people.

How would you make it not be anti-poor without some kind of road taxation based on income (which would mean those with the most money would pay the least as they can afford help to abuse the loopholes)?

Yes, that's a problem. I've debated with myself over what would be a fair division of "limited access" in my case but not arrived at a satisfactory solution. Anything I can think of will devolve into an inefficient, sucky, inofficial market. (This is why I'm contemplating an efficient, less sucky, official market in the first place.)

To be clear: the infrastructure I'm working on isn't transport, but it'd still be odd to only allow paying users. I was thinking two similar copies of this piece infrastructure, where one is priced to avoid congestion, and the other will be as congested as induced demand allows.

I'd like the discussion to stay general because I suspect any solutions will be reusable.

...another example is the bus/metro transportation card: in many cities you get charged both based on your income bracket, usage pattern and things like being retired/student/young/adult and so on

This is a great point and one applicable to my case as well. I have an obvious proxy for income bracket to even out the playing field. Thanks!