See, here's the thing. Definition of acceptable isn't up to you. It's up to the people who have no other choice but to use it.

Theoretically those people express their opinion via electing representatives. Infrastructure investment and "fixing the potholes" seems to be a common campaign theme.

It really isn't followed through on as often as you think, and since Citizen's United, the typical candidate tends to chase the donations of people who think tolls are a grand idea. Not so much the rest of the working stiffs. Institutional inertia is a hell of a thing when your working demographic is keeping the retiree's and children's heads above water.

Maybe the solution is more going over to a fee based on % of one’s net worth. So since you seem to think something like $6 being an acceptable price for someone with a $500 net worth, maybe 1.2% of net worth for each traversal of a segment is appropriate, so you pay maybe $24,000 with every trip down the toll road and Elon musk pays $9.12 billion, while the bottom of the rung working class can pay $6.

I… wow, I actually really like this idea. As you may have seen in my other comments, I’m not blind to the advantages of toll money being used to improve roads etc. This preserves that upside, while making the publicly owned resource roughly equally available to everyone.

I think the right solution is charge whatever would maximize revenue, then distribute the revenues evenly among all residents/voters/whomever.

I am actually fine with letting people who do higher value labor get faster to their destination. We only do these foolish bending over backwards for equity things in the public sphere and ultimately we all pay as a society.

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.

> If $3-$8 a day isn't worth it for you, there's a free option that's totally acceptable.

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.