I think everyone here is more or less on board with the idea that roads are a public good that everyone should have access to. The question is
- Is this the kind of public good that we should fund the way we fund things like schools, police and the EPA? (i.e., from a common tax base that is unrelated to individual usage) or,
- Is this the kind of public good that we should fund the way we fund the postal service and municipal water supply? (i.e., a government-provided or tightly regulated monopoly in which funding is closely correlated to individual usage)
I believe fair arguments can be made for both positions.
One reason to consider the latter approach is that when any public resource is effectively free to use then anyone running a private business is sure to exploit that resource to the extent the law allows. For example: if the amount we paid for access to clean drinking water wasn’t strongly correlated to how much we use, then there would be no financial motive for either businesses or individuals to conserve water. If the postal service was effectively free to use then the net result would likely be a huge windfall for companies like Amazon at the expense of everyone else. The same principle is true for roads: if you make roads an effectively free resource for everyone to use then you better expect big corporations to squeeze every penny they can out of the opportunity.
