The worse problem is that road pricing is effectively a regressive tax. It most hurts the people who need it most, and are least able to afford it.

Although, with electronic toll devices, you could at least potentially give toll credits to low-income folks.

The current system of promoting cars above all other forms of transportation is more regressive than road pricing would be. Vehicle ownership and miles traveled are positively correlated with income. People with lower income are more likely to be reliant on underfunded public transportation that gets stuck in traffic (i.e. busses) caused by higher income drivers. Not to mention all the other externalities like pollution that cars cause, which disproportionately affect lower income neighborhoods.

So would you favor selling bread and other necessities for $0 by the same argument?

Toll roads?

Textbook regressive tax, even more so in this day and age where the less well off you are the more likely you are to have to live further out. You can always find someone poorer who commutes by bus to underpin an anecdote but going from renting an apartment within the public transit network to owning a car, renting outside the public transit network and commuting in is a big level up for most people because despite the commute arguably being worse it gives you flexibility when choosing your next jobs so your next steps up come easier.

Paying for what you consume is not a tax!

This argument is only applied to road consumption for some reason.

Note that is road pricing makes traffic flow at the speed limit rather than crawling during rush hour, people can commute from much further away.

>Paying for what you consume is not a tax!

Everybody is already paying for it in their taxes. Furthermore everybody is also paying per use for the energy used, time and cost of vehicle ownership.

How would you like it if the city started charging per use at the park beside your house? Maybe then you'd see how comically asinine it is to repressively tax public infrastructure that we have already decided is a net positive.

And I'll preempt the obvious low effort retort by saying that city public transit should also be free at the point of use.

>Note that is road pricing makes traffic flow at the speed limit rather than crawling during rush hour, people can commute from much further away.

Yeah, if you're a doctor or lawyer or techie and can justify the cost relative to your increased earnings from commuting. The drywaller and the janitor have just as much right to sit in a traffic jam as you do.

Increasing the cost per use for public good when not coupled to an increased cost to provide that good (last I checked bitumen prices didn't skyrocket) ALWAYS boils down to kicking the poors out so that whosoever left can have a better experience. This approach is completely antithetical to the reasoning behind spending money on these public goods in the first place.

Making everyone endure the same crap equally ensures that the people who can most effectively load balance to something else or a different commute time do.

> Everybody is already paying for it in their taxes. Furthermore everybody is also paying per use for the energy used, time and cost of vehicle ownership.

Sure, but they're not paying for using up the finite resource of road usage at high demand times. If too many people use the road at the same time, it ceases to function as a transportation route, and no one gets good use of it.

You can think of it as "equality" when a common resource is destroyed equally for rich and for poor, but it's not good for anyone, and there are better ways.

> The drywaller and the janitor have just as much right to sit in a traffic jam as you do.

I'll spell out my point more clearly: If roads that today creep along at 30mph at rush hour start going 70mph, the drywaller can choose to live in a cheaper area further away, pay a bit extra for commuting, and still come out ahead.

Final point: It's common misunderstanding, but roads are NOT public goods: https://fee.org/articles/are-roads-really-public-goods/

Your entire angle of approaching this reeks of "everyone else should take the bus so I can leave the office at 4:59 and not hit traffic".

>Sure, but they're not paying for using up the finite resource of road usage at high demand times. If too many people use the road at the same time, it ceases to function as a transportation route, and no one gets good use of it.

Time and money can be converted.

If you don't wanna share the road with everyone else then commute at different times or use a different mode.

The people who's time is most valuable also tend to have the most money and options for other commute options.

>: If roads that today creep along at 30mph at rush hour start going 70mph, the drywaller can choose to live in a cheaper area further away, pay a bit extra for commuting, and still come out ahead.

You have to price out the bottom to get things flowing at peak speeds all the time.

Furthermore, expecting any transit system, rail, road, anything, to not be saturated at peak hours is unrealistic. Increasing supply or decreasing demand just reduce the time the network is saturated. Rush hour is like like dumping a bucket into a sink, you're gonna get a little standing water while the drain does its thing.

>Final point: It's common misunderstanding, but roads are NOT public goods: https://fee.org/articles/are-roads-really-public-goods/

What a BS article. His requirement of "nonrivalrous consumption" exudes damn near every other example of something that is generally considered a public good.

I think we've reached the end of fruitful discussion.

The "nonrivalrous consumption" part is genuinely how the term is defined in Economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)

The term has since been morphed/co-opted into meaning something like "good for the public" in political discourse, deeply frustrating economists, and making these kinds of discussions difficult to have.