This is precisely the reasoning I bring up. In essence traffic congestion is an externality not unlike pollution. What society now pays in the form of a financial levy it formerly paid in the form of a wasted time. We've made explicit a cost that was already there, and by doing so the system can respond to it and behave more intelligently.

> What society now pays in the form of a financial levy it formerly paid in the form of a wasted time.

Where it gets to be a problem is when instead of spending 40 minutes to get somewhere because of time stuck in traffic many people become priced out of driving and now have to spend 1.5 hours on public transportation to make the same trip. The cost of wasted time in this specific case might not be as extreme, but as more public roads are paywalled off around the country I expect we'll see more people forced to use inadequate public transportation suffer.

your reasoning falls apart because mass transit options are inherently faster due to the geometric-space efficiencies gained by their form factors. You just need to induce enough people to participate in it to cross a tipping point where it becomes financially viable to run regular service, e.g., in NYC taking a train is often the fastest.

Exactly. The janitor has every right to sit in gridlock beside the CEO. If either doesn't like it they can adjust things but realistically the CEO's got the most ability and incentive to do so.

These artificial price distortions wind up most benefiting the people who were in the best position to alter their behavior.

Driving your car incurs real externalities. Putting a price on it fixes the artificial extra incentive to drive, by making freeloaders pay up.