Reducing the congestion isn't the goal though. Increasing throughput is. Cars simply have worse throughput than a train, or a bus for that matter. Simple as that. Charging more money would be counterproductive unless that money served to build out transit since you would increase the congestion on the non-toll roads.
There will be no political will to invest in quality public transit unless there is lots of pain in using comfortable and convenient individual vehicle transit.
Paying $100+ for a trip will make people support bus and train and bicycle infrastructure investments. Keep driving costs down at $0.60 to $1.00 per minute or per mile, and it makes sense to use your own car, which then means it makes sense to support initiatives that are contrary to public transit, such as mandated parking lot minimums and giant roads.
in practice this doesn't make sense since people are broke. you're be punishing them for no reason, they would continue to drive on more and more congested roads, take longer to get to their destination and you wouldn't raise enough to build out public transit. everyone loses. well, actually, I guess rich people paying $100 a ride on underutilized roads would win. great for them I guess.
Make use fees explicitly progressive: pay a fee to use the road, and then at the end of the month, the bottom 25% get back 150% of the average fee, middle 50% get 100%, top 25% get 50% back.
Drive less than average and you're making a profit regardless of where you are on the scale.
> the retort comes up because charging egregiously to use public roads that they're all paying for with their tax money makes no sense.
So, stop paying for the roads with tax money. Fully internalize the costs with user fees, directing tax spending elsewhere, and the argument about fairness of tax spending goes away. In fact, raise the user fees high enough that the road users are subsidizing other public projects, specifically mass transit, as well as paying the full cost of the roads.
The idea that a single person is paying a specific part of infrastructure makes no sense. My taxes do not pay for a specific road, they pay for the operations for society as a whole.
Sometimes, that would mean my taxes are going to pay for something which hurts me in the short term, if I want to get to a future where individual cars are not used as much and walking/bicycling/public transit are possible.
The problem is this is just some leftist fantasy and the idea that to solve all of the consequences is to just do wealth distribution is not surprising. You would need to reform the government into a dictatorship to keep these legislations in place. And this is to solve “gridlock”? People already experience gridlock and are not clamoring for a Maoist state.
It is not to solve “gridlock”. It is to change infrastructure to better use society’s resources so that people spend less time in cars and more time living life.
The solutions that worked when there were x number of people living in an area, with y number of miles traveled in z number of individual cars simply might not work if you double or triple x, y, and z given the hard boundary conditions of the world such as space, pollutions, and supply of materials and energy.
I'd rather work in a slow car than be crammed into a full bus. You miss how self driving is changing the economics. A major component of the appeal of public transportation has been that you can do other things while using it. This made up for its (sometimes extreme) inefficiencies with regards to the time it takes you to get to your destination. In fact self driving cars will have an advantage there because you won't have to switch vehicles.
