It's maybe not "fair" that some people can use this option indiscriminately every day, but at least it is an option that everyone has access to. There's no physical barrier stopping you from using the Texas toll roads if you really needed to in an emergency. All that will happen is a bill will appear in your mailbox about 30 days later. If you choose to not pay it, the chances something bad will happen are approximately zero.
And it could be made ineffective as regional expansion continues. As soon as enough people who are willing to pay the toll saturates capacity you end up with the same issue (“just one more lane bro”). I see this all the time in the DC metro area’s toll express lanes that often save no significant time.
Another effective way to control highway congestion is to get people off of highways and invest in your transit system, make it better than driving so that people don’t drive as often.
But maybe Houston is too far gone for that.
For comparison, the Chicago red line extension project adds 5 miles of heavy rail for about twice the cost, so 4x more per mile. But the Houston toll lane project doesn’t do anything positive for adjacent property values like new rail stations do. Chicago will get money back from more property taxes and the new stations will relieve traffic on the Dan Ryan.
Transit lines get faster as ridership increases due to the ability to increase schedule frequency, the exact opposite of highways.
I am not saying Houston should magically turn into 1800s-era urban fabric but maybe some decent park and ride commuter transit would be a start? There are cities in Texas with 6 figure populations that have NO public bus system.
Increase the toll prices to reduce congestion, increase the number of buses on that route, and use some of the money for either expanding the road or building another more-or-less parallel road.
This stretch of road is already using congestion/dynamic pricing. I've never had to go slower than 85mph the entire way.
It’s like Disney World. They can fill the parks with people willing to pay $200 a day for tickets alone. If you can’t afford it then it doesn’t matter that other people get to get in.
Highways just don’t scale well. Two train tracks can move about the same number of people as 15 lanes of highway.
[1]the kind who have so few problems that freeway proximity makes it high on the list of things that inform where they choose to live
Light rail has been there since before the toll lanes.
This is not a small medical center, some of the hospitals are skyscrapers.
Houston’s red line has similar ridership levels to Chicago’s third busiest L line.
The two metro areas have a very similar population.
In Houston the rail does not actually extend to any suburbs, if they have that in Chicago it would probably make a big difference.
I got the idea when they were building it in Houston that a large bit of the Metro system is geared toward transporting people in lower-income areas who can't afford cars, so they can gain employment downtown and in the med center.
When it comes to toll roads most suburbs have a long-established freeway commute, but directly west from downtown a major suburb is known as the International District containing a large concentration of immigrants. The only traffic solution leading in that direction was built as a tollway instead.
It all started with the Beltway 8 toll bridge with toll that was cheaper than the gas saved by taking alternate routes.
By now the toll road authority has expanded and embraced a growth mindset for so long, and in recent years gotten so expensive, that any upcoming candidate for County Judge may be able to prevail on a single-issue of lowering the tolls alone.
This is how most US cities view public transit: poor people only.
Only a handful of US cities treat it as something that everyone uses, places like NYC, Chicago, DC, and Boston.
Houston should have an equivalent to the Metra or MBTA commuter rail.
You Americans are so funny. Japan is hotter and more humid yet public transit and walking are not an issue. Taipei similar story, rapidly building out rail in a hotter place.
You build the rail, then upzome the areas around stations and over time those giant ashfault lots go away and become urban centres.
Is it?
https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/9247~143809/Comparison-of...
People like you are funny too but its easy to make posts like yours. Density in most urban parts of Japan and Taipei are wildly higher than say a Houston Texas. Again like I said, you are oversimplifying the problem which I get it, its easy to do. I don't think this is as simple as "build the rail, then upzone the area around stations", would happy to be wrong but I think like all of the world there are cultural and historical reasons for the difference.
It would take decades, you need buy in from both tax payers, commercial buildings, retail spaces, home builders etc.
It would be great if you could have a central planner like a China to just build a city with all the infrastructure in place but in places like America, that does not happen and so its a very tough egg to crack. Keep in mind its not just about being hot, definitely lots of Japan and Taiwan are very humid but you are also in city centers that have 8-9x the density of Houston. Lots of things to do and often you are most likely not walking that far, relative for city walking. I could walk a mile in Houston and still have not left my starting spot.
I'm being harsh, Houston isn't completely terrible. There is a lot of culture and diversity. But you can't really get to it because everything is too far, and you're already tired from commuting 10 hours that week.
I mean, ideally, I could say I want to live all on my own in a mansion far away from everyone else. But I still want access to the world's best food, entertainment, and socialization. But it's just not possible.
Everything is compromises. We can't be erecting hundreds of miles of road and acres of parking lots so people have a 10 by 10 foot lawn, you know? And ultimately it will come back to them, too. Because commuting does suck, and I think most people know it sucks. They just can't, or won't, put two and two together on their lifestyle and commuting. They're inherently linked!
The tradeoff isn't live like rats. That's the tradeoff RIGHT NOW, because we designed our cities for maximum suckage.
But really, you can have reasonable space and a decent commute. Light rail goes a long way, and not spending 50% of your land on parking lots does too.
When you design your cities around cars, there are really no winners. People might think that's just the natural cost of having a home, but it's just not. You can have denser cities with more space per person. Because, remember, most of the space in Houston is currently worthless. It can't actually be used by people.
So it's still dense where it matters. The pockets of goodness are just that. Between the roads and parking lots there's little dense pockets of life, and that's where everything actually happens.
Look, think of it this way. If we don't spend 50% of our most valuable space on parking lots, your home can be 50% larger. AND in an area where it matters, instead of in Timbuktu.
Light rail is terrible and anyone acting like it’s not is immediately written off as a non thinker imo. If you’re gonna do rail do it right.
Meaning, I don't think people are commuting 2 hours or three or whatever because they LIKE to. Rather, they're victims of poor poor urban design, and most of them, too, would prefer not that.
I don't think a single soul is moving to Houston because of the commute. They're doing it in spite of the commute. But wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to do that?
Ultimately its optional, it's a choice. We could have Houston without the commute. Everyone could live the life they want without a commute, if we just put in the time and effort to design our urban spaces around that. And, if people really do want to commute - more power. I don't think that's a desire that will ever be rare to find. But we probably shouldn't be optimizing for shit, right? Or, at least, what I think we both agree most people think is shit.
I do think there is room for more these "New Urbanist" style developments which I have seen a few of in Texas. w the builder puts retail buildings centralized in the development. Lots of real parks and other type of shared resources for the community. Something where you still have a house with a yard but you can walk to the coffee shop in your neighborhood.
It costs money which taxpayers don't want to pay (unless it benefits them personally,) it requires long term planning which governments are incapable of, and it smells like socialism.
A rail system, no matter how fast and efficient, can never get close to matching that.
Sure you can find plenty of random places it would take longer for me to get to by train, but for places I actually want to get to, the subway is faster.
I live in the DC area which has an excellent Metrorail system, and it is still nowhere near close enough to being able to replace the average trip by car unless you in DC proper.
Now imagine how much worse things would be in Houston.
Spoiler: All of them should be this way
Absent that we'll need to wait for population growth (not happening, if anything we're going the other way) or immigration (ha) to fill our cities up to NYC density.
Note that NYC itself used to be even more dense than it is today. No other U.S. city is likely to reach even NYC's current density in any near- to medium-time scale.
Nope: One need only wait for the financial collapse that is fast approaching nearly every municipality in the US due to the relative scale of infrastructure buildout + maintenance as compared to its tax base.
The "standard" American city is 100% unambiguously completely financially impossible.
This is obscured by the fact that cities traditionally account for their infrastructure as depreciating assets whose value goes to zero rather than as perpetual liabilities with exponentially increasing maintenance costs, where the expected maintenance burden of a road already far exceeds its "asset value" on day one of its creation (when it's added to the city's balance sheet as "an asset.")
The American sprawl pattern is financially impossible.
Nice snark though!
I don’t like that it creates separate classes of infrastructure for citizens based on their ability to pay. Even the non-toll highways had an HOT-like lane you paid per-use to drive on that was often significantly faster than the free lanes.
It makes a system where I suspect many people won’t want to pay to upgrade the free infrastructure because they don’t use it, and people who can’t afford the daily tolls waste even more time in traffic. The fast pass lane are even worse because they cannibalize lanes that could be used to alleviate general traffic (and were typically sparsely used).
The tolls were substantial for some people. $3-$8 a day on toll roads (ie no fast pass lane). At $8 a day, that’d be $40 a week, ~$160/month. That’s nearly 20% of the weekly pre-tax income of someone making Austin’s $22/hr minimum wage.
If you want cars off the road, you tax rich people and build trains and bike lanes, and shut down cynical RTO. Full stop.
This is almost diametrically opposite to parking-oriented cities and sprawling suburbia.
Every time I attempt to read it, halfway through my brain flips into the mode that is normally reserved for when people start telling me that Ivermectin is a COVID remedy, or something equally farcical.
Please take a moment to remind yourself of the guidelines and make an effort to follow them in future.
Note that this holds without even having to mention that holding the ability for millions of people to be independent and mobile without needing to purchase and maintain a vehicle against a niche and expensive hobby is ridiculous. But there's no need to bring that up because we can have both.
The first two smell like communism, the last massively harms the rich people and their playthings (REITs - real estate investment trusts). Won't happen, not in countries where Big Money is pulling the strings (i.e. the US, Germany and UK).
Getting better government services logically follows from paying more for them, but the idea is so sacrilegious and alien that people would probably riot.
If you want to raise the money to buy land and build a private highway, price segment away. If you want to price segment a publicly owned and operate commons, it needs to be in the public interest.
You can argue about popularity if you want, the topic is actually about whether they're "in the public interest" though. Those are distinct things, and "I don't like them because they're unpopular" is pretty hilariously circular logic -- not the type of thinking I'd want my name attached to, that's for sure!
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/conges...
>The problem is that the model no longer works. Over the decades, the cost of maintaining roads and highways has risen, even as cars have become more fuel-efficient. And raising gas taxes, even just in line with inflation, is generally considered to be political suicide. The last time Congress did it was in 1993. The result is a giant deficit. In fiscal 2024, the federal government spent $27bn more on maintaining roads than it collected in tax. At the state and local levels, fuel taxes covered barely a quarter of road spending.
So apparently that's how the owner intends to raise the money and build. Beyond that, "who should pay for government spending" is of course the perennial discussion, and exactly what we are debating right now.
Driving and public transport is not a business, it is a civil service.
Should we begin to offer tiered plans for EMS as well?
We do sort of have tiered EMS with insurance and ambulance costs. When my buddy came to the US from India, he was told, "unless you're blessing out, call an Uber to the ER."
It seems like a good property that someone who uses something the most pays the most.
If something has positive externalities such as vaccines or education then I’m fine subsidizing or making it free, but traffic has negative externalities.
Anyway, the point is not about the precedent but whether it is sensible. And that's not to imply that I love the country being sold off to billionaires and corporations right now. For medical care I go the other direction - we need the government funded base offering.
Certainly, but in many states, at least on the west coast (not to imply anything about elsewhere, just no experience or knowledge) they are privatized but rates and metering are still regulated.
> Anyway, the point is not about the precedent but whether it is sensible. And that's not to imply that I love the country being sold off to billionaires and corporations right now. For medical care I go the other direction - we need the government funded base offering.
And I 100% agree here. I have a fairly unique (or at least uncommon) set of experiences: was born in Scotland under the NHS, grew up in Australia under Medicare (the public health system), and have been in the US for 15+ years now, and worked for a good portion of that at least part time or full time in EMS and seen every day the consequences of lack of access to healthcare or access in a way that is focused on acute care versus solid proactive and routine care.
We saw this very clearly recently with the Manhattan congestion road tax. $9 paid no more than once per day to drive into Lower Manhattan is close to nothing by NYC standards, yet traffic still dropped substantially and stayed suppressed.
idea: Maximize the income of the toll lane and use the money to subsidize new free lanes or other forms of mass transit.
If you want to help poor people, tax and then redistribute. Don’t make a million small rules and discounts that make things less efficient and our society poorer.
That, in fact, isn't always true.
In Austin, for example, I-45 was supposed to have "frontage roads" all along it so that people could avoid the toll road if they chose at the expense of going through a few traffic lights.
Gee, guess what somehow magically never got built in many sections of I-45? So, your options are pay the toll or go a LONG way out of the way in order to avoid it since the construction of the tollway also destroyed the old routes.
But ... government income is largely dependent on the rich, and government spending largely benefits the poor. This is what is always forgotten about it. The reason debt is such a thorny issue is that debt really benefited the poor. And over time, so will these toll roads.
The reason toll roads benefit the poor is that the rich don't travel anyways, and this gives extra economic options to the poor. A large portion will figure out how to use this extra economic option (because that was thoroughly checked before the bridge was even built, and it wouldn't have been built if the answer wasn't that they would)
So both the building of the bridge, and the use of it almost exclusively benefit the poor.
Asking someone to waste maybe up to an hour of their life everyday to sit there and watch people willing to break the rules speed by and get to be home early with their families breeds massive resentment, and anger. It encourages people to abandon all sorts of social contracts.
1. Trucks - not keeping the lanes, speeding (it's 70mph cars and 60mph trucks, trucks bypass me when I'm driving 70).
2. Old company vans and pickups - that's surprising to me, but I frequently see some old Gutter/Plumbing/Heating van darting in an out of lanes. I'd think they'd get fined or in accident sooner or later, but still.
3. Large pickups. They usually are speeding, going in and out of HOV lane closer to Seattle. Never saw HOV enforced on I90.
The enforcement was somehow increased this year, but only until heavy traffic (you can see it daily 5am-6:30am), but never during heavy traffic, which would be more helpful.
One thing I have noticed from using satnav is that even with a mostly motorway journey the difference between driving fast and driving at a more leisurely pace is never more than a minute or two per hour compared to the predicted time.
I knew it from seeing how often I later caught up with someone driving very aggressively, but quantifying it made me realise just how consistent the small difference is.
And fwiw, I abhor illegal and antisocial driving and wish there were much more enforcement of traffic laws. And where it's a necessary cost, I'd be happy to have a longer commute if we were all safer for it.
I think congestion pricing is probably a net win, and the lesser evil right now, but tolls are so regressive I wish we could do better by making public transport not suck.
I think it's more of the self-deception that they're more important than others and that they're meaningfully getting ahead of others. This is a major issue in American culture where it's not just about doing great, but about doing "better" than others (competitive in areas it's pointless to be competitive about)
E: it is not legal to pass on the right in MN, unless you’re on a multi-lane road; which is basically all major arteries and thus makes this law unenforceable for all intents and purposes.
I used to have to do this round trip commute, and could consistently save ~3 hours per week of time by driving more aggressively, and I never got a ticket driving like this doing the commute weekly for years.
I do however try to be as courteous and safe as possible, and would time my lane changes to maintain safe following distances and not actually cut people off. If people would stay right except while passing like they're supposed to, this wouldn't be needed.
Whoever downvoted your comment has either never driven this stretch of the 5 or they are the reason it is so bad.
It’s the idiots in cars who insist on doing exactly 65 in the left lane next to a semi that cause the problem. Get past just one idiot holding back hundreds of cars and you will find miles of completely open road.
Fines should be designed to make it uneconomical to continue to reoffend.
Plenty of people pay the fine and admit to guilt to avoid being further penalized with court fees, etc. In other words, many people just pay a injustice fine to avoid more trouble. This would punish those type of people even more.
The system is in fact architected to maximize this in some states. Virginia and Ohio come to mind.
It's not that the poor person speeding is any less dangerous than the rich person speeding, it's that the $300 fine doesn't really matter to the rich person. It's just a price they're willing to pay on random occasions to go faster.
Has this been tested and shown to be successful or is your confidence based on feels?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine
Surprisingly they were experimented with in the UK, for a very brief period of time. But not taken into use.
Every now and again a particularly large fine, often for speeding, will make the news. For example this story does the rounds now and again "Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket":
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...
All I can say is that when you've been asked to pay €50,000 for speeding I suspect you'll be hesitant to speed again, and so I believe the system works.
Great. Fine me $1 million, and I will fight the case with lawyers, thus slowing down the public legal system for thousands of other legal cases, whether traffic related or otherwise.
And by "IDK" I mean "I have some suspicions but they're not flattering to the community".
Most of society doesn't share most of HN's pro-jackboot disposition so there'd be warnings, appeals, etc, etc.
As a comparison point, it took a 20yr frog boiling exercise to turn DUI into a huge state revenue stream and that's at least backed by a crime most people can agree is fairly serious. To get the same for less serious crime you'd need to invest even more up front in propaganda because people aren't dropping dead from road infractions today like they were 40+yr ago so your ability to appeal to emotion is even more limited.
We can't even release the Epstein files. We don't go full jackboot on petty crimes with a victim. To think that there's public apetite to ruinously fine motorists out of large sums of money over petty victimless infractions is Luxury Space Communism (TM) type tone deaf lunacy.
And this is all assuming you get a bunch of friendly judges because this stuff is pushing it in terms of what the 6/7/8/14th amendments will tolerate.
Like FFS, get out of your filter bubble people.
The wealthy speeder shrugs it off, while the poor speeder has to change their spending allocation in a way that is noticeable and could be challenging.
Why should the punishment have a different impact based on wealth? The felt impact of a monetary fine fundamentally depends on how much money the offender has. Whereas the classic “locked in a cage” punishment affects everyone equally.
A $490 ticket every 5 years works out to only $1.88 per week- effectively free for anyone that makes enough money to commute in a car in the first place.
If you define dangerous as "how dare that BMW not use a blinker" type moves, yeah that stuff is everywhere.
If you define dangerous as "Y likely to cause an accident given X exposure" then it must be tautologically rare because if people were behaving seriously dangerously get bit by it in fairly short order. I can't remember the last time I saw a "wow, that was really pushing it and in poor taste" move. Weeks perhaps.
And make the fines based on income.
Driving a car without a registration will (in theory) get you pulled over, and eventually your car will be impounded.
In practice? Car ownership is required to participate in society in most parts of the US and governments are very unwilling to take away people's ability to drive.
Because there isn't support for the iron fisted rules enforcement a lot of HN favors and if the .gov just did it anyway the people would elect politicians who promise to reign that in. Keeping the power on the books and rarely using it is what benefits .gov the most so it's what they do.
i truly see enough people doing this when i commute that at $500/ticket i could cover my entire state income tax in 1-2 days. seems obviously economical to enforce this.
Seems like a pretty ideal system. Having that extra lane wouldn’t solve any issues for most drivers. For high occupancy or those willing to pay, it does.
Under high congestion traffic throughput plummets. Restricted access to one or more lanes lets you keep them flowing at near the peak, increasing the overall throughput of the system by much more than one of the congested lanes.
When before/after studies have been done, the HOV lanes around here generally make everything worse.
> I can look over and see that more than half of the drivers are in violation, and yet it is effectively unenforced.
OTOH, I don't know how you could effectively enforce that single occupant vehicles are paying.
For automated enforcement, there's prior art in red light camera systems that mail tickets/violations to the registered vehicle owner.
It's something that isn't straight obvious though. When I got there I also thought that people were just in violation of the people requirement.
I don't get the point of the occupancy reader if there's no hard-requirement of 3+ in the current zone. Maybe there are some stricter HOV-only lanes nowadays? I left the bay area in late 2023
Once when bored in very slow nearly stopped traffic during rush hour on a stretch of the 80 with no fasttrack, and in a vehicle high enough to see if there were kids in the nearby cars, I counted a large sample (about 50) cars and found that roughly two thirds of the HOV occupants were in violation.
The standard Econ solution is to set a price that maximizes throughput. At least some toll roads are attempting to hit that price.
https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freewaymgmt/hovguidance/chapter4.ht...
This covers pretty much all of the lanes that people complain about so I'll stand by what I said.
The money raised by auctioning access is of some public benefit, but is it enough to offset the deep unfairness of the public granting, for example, software engineers a shorter commute on average than teachers?
> for example, software engineers a shorter commute on average than teachers?
Housing prices already have this kind of effect -- highly compensated employees can afford to live closer to their preferred locations. There's no reason not to allocate road resources to the users who are willing to pay for them (which is a much broader segment of the population than just software engineers). Pricing is a better system than road communism.
A dog-eats-dog jungle of underdeveloped monkeys in clothing, on the other hand, sure.
If you're in SF and you get a call that your mother is in the hospital in SJ and it's 5pm, you would happily pay $100 in tolls to get there (I think the actual price is less than $20).
Unfortunately, there is no practical way to do this other than by charging money to use the fast lane, and this means that the rich will get more of the scarce resources than the poor.
This is no big deal - it's kind of a tautology, if you really think about it.
The "this is how money works" argument doesn't work well for chattel slavery and it doesn't work well for this either...
On a few of them, but not the ones I commute on and am talking about. If you do use one of the 'pay' lanes, it becomes free if you switch your fasttrak device to '3+' setting, and given the frequency of visually obvious violations in the ones you can't pay for, I would be surprised if many people are actually paying for the ones you can pay for.
However, when you’re looking at 100’s of cars doing the same thing false positives only account for a small percentage of that.
And the point about cops is exactly the issue - there is an actual human who observes and notes that it was a false positive, vs an anonymous report with no counterpoint entered into whatever database is tracking these reports.
And I think at certain times it's only >= 2 people.
Every system?
They’re a money / surveillance grab.
It’s not a money grab as much as moving more of the actual cost of freeways onto drivers who are mostly used to externalizing it
If you want to feel pissed about something: One of the most popular new cars purchased in California was the Jeep Wrangler 4xe, because it gave you HOV access and a $7,500 tax credit, even though nobody charges it and its battery is anemic anyway.
No, I'm not mad about the Wrangler 4xe, it's really great that plug in hybrid tech is moving into a wider range of vehicles useful for things like rough terrain. A small battery is still plenty for the vast majority of driving people actually do.
https://www.bayareafastrak.org/en/help/invoices-and-penaltie...
I'm having a hard time finding a citation but according to Google's AI summary if the second violation is unpaid they put a hold on your DMV registration, and the fine itself can be sent to a collection agency.
I agree empirically I see people driving through the lane without a tag (i.e., no number shows up in the overhead display), but maybe these are people with FasTrak accounts being lazy?
Or lie and set the transponder to 3 people
Or don't have license plates so can't be identified
Rarely a good citation. No pun intended.
I spend about four to five months per year in the Bay Area, but have Canadian license plates. The website doesn't even let you enter a Canadian plate, or a foreign plate.
So I bought one of the transponders at Walgreens, and just leave it in the glove box because it has 20 bucks or something when you buy it.
But I can't check its status, don't know how much is left on it, have no idea what I'm paying, really sucks.
There's a lesson about society and government in there.
We have that problem here in Germany. The roads aren't just slow - the people living in the towns these roads run through are going through hell because they are affected massively. Can't safely cross the road, emergency response vehicles take ages, an insane amount of noise and emissions (because vehicles near idle make much more toxic exhaust when at low load and thus temperature), more brake and tire dust... Austria was fed up years ago, Bavaria recently followed suit [1].
[1] https://www.adac.de/der-adac/regionalclubs/suedbayern/news/a...
...so I have a trailer hitch ball hung entirely across my plate — not considered "obstructing view" de jure, but YMMV (depending on officer).
Tennessee does not issue license plates for most trailers, either, so you can easily & even more legally conceal your license plate when towing.
Anything else that obstructs the view is illegal (including bicycle racks, leaves, dirt, lenses). But not trailers & hitch balls.
You can still throw them way off giving directions if you tell them to get off the freeway at Frontage Road, especially with a French Cajun accent ;)
Loads of exits in all locations and directions have a lone sign at the ramp simply saying "Frontage Rd." pointing at the exit.
You have to look at a sign miles earlier to know what exit it really is.
There's a YT channel where a guy exposes these. He found that one of the most common group of offenders in NYC was ... cops and their personal vehicles.
An issue is that it's set up as a regular loan, which the collected toll repays. So over the lifetime of the loan, often more than half is interest. Add administration costs and in some cases the actual money spent on the road is a small fraction of the total toll paid.
That said, in principle I think it's fair to have some use-based pricing. Same goes for public transportation. Studies have shown it's not ideal to have free public transportation, but rather a low fare.
That’s the only idea that makes sense to me.
The ones in the cities have a tendency to stay though, as they find new infrastructure projects to finance.
I don't agree. Price "discrimination" for government services is not acceptable. The perverse incentives that sets up are far too strong and the profits too juicy to avoid corruption.
We have historical analogs (paying for fire service and the corruption that caused in Rome). We have modern analogs (money from marijuana funding police forces that then arrest marijuana offenders and fight legalization efforts).
Letting price discrimination enter government services is simply a road to corruption and disaster.
The best transit systems are the ones that are almost fully subsidized with a token payment that doesn't price discriminate. We have strong examples of the problems with price discrimination in water (the entire American Southwest). Electricity "markets" gave us Enron and semi-privatized electric companies are currently giving us shutdowns because they are liable for causing fires--neither of these would be an issue if electricity is a flat market based on usage without price discrimination.
Everything you mentioned used to be what we called a "utility" and was the job of government to provide, oversee and generally subsidize. It was only since about 1980 that governments started trying to "privatize" these kinds of things with the magical thinking that somehow "profit incentive" would magically make them cheaper to run.
Yes, usage above and beyond basic levels was generally paid for at "point of use"--especially if the resource was limited (see: water). However, that payment needs to be somehow "metered" and with pricing that rises significantly as usage moves further from baseline in order to disincentivize over-consumption.
In the case of tolls (which started this discussion), that means the baseline price should be set to "damage incurred" which is "fourth power of weight" (if I remember correctly). Cars should be a low price; brodozers should pay significantly more than cars; loaded semis should pay a lot more. Adjust as necessary based upon time and load in order to manage traffic.
By linking to something directly meterable, you avoid the perverse incentives where the poor get disproportionately hit and the rich simply ignore everything (see: Nestle pumping water out of aquifers).
And in the absence of these congestion fees we’d likely have to take taxes overall. That would probably be even worse for poor people.
Also trains/subways are obviously another non-road transport option.
Toll roads are the worst. The fact that there are increasing numbers of them is as much a bellwether of the death of the American experiment experiment as anything else.
* HOT lanes in the Bay Area: they allocate demand efficiently and subsidize multi-people transport. I wish there were more.
* Toll roads in Texas: you can take the slip roads almost everywhere but they’re slow. The highways were fast but you had to pay.
Overall, I think fare at point of use is a great structure. In the past we couldn’t enforce it but now we can do this for more things.
The only problem is that we’ve decided that impounding cars that don’t have license plates or which have license plate covers is unacceptable because the poor do this most frequently. I hope we will clean up enforcement and then we will have the right incentives here.