Discouraging driving in general is one thing with one market price, discouraging driving where it leads to congestion is another thing with a higher market price.
Not all vehicles that cause congestion even use gasoline, which is another reason for why trying to solve congestion with higher fuel taxes is a bad idea. Your Tesla is just as bad for congestion as a gas guzzler.
Even ignoring that, regional fuel charges don't fix the problem. There's plenty of big cities where you can drive in specific areas or at specific times without causing any congestion problems, which is why it makes sense to charge road tolls on specific roads at specific times.
Vehicles can also drive to different regions to fill up, which becomes a big problem of arbitrage if you try to make the regions too granular.
Congestion already has it's own price directly in increased travel time. Which pushes people to use optimal routes to a destination. However, routing around congestion increases pollution via trip length. So you want to increase peoples ability to go from A > B, not hinder peopling moving from A > B with increased cost.
PS: We want higher mileage people to get electric cars, so having no transit tax actually efficiently promotes higher mileage people from making the switch first. It's just one of many subsides associated with electric cars, but we will eventually just charge based on odometer readings.
> Congestion already has it's own price
> directly in increased travel time.
Which is clearly not enough, as detailed in the article. If people only had to pay with their own time they would, and the road would be congested, hence the high toll. This is basic supply & demand.
You just keep asserting that people should pay for their pollution, I agree! But that's not always the maximum price you should pay.
> charge based on odometer readings.
Which would be another case of not charging based on the actual cost. You could drive your street legal car around in circles on a private track, and you should pay almost no road tax, but someone who exclusively uses public roads should pay more. Under this scheme you'd pay the same for both cars.
> Which is clearly not enough, as detailed in the article.
40$ is actually close to the market rate of time saved for a large percentage of people driving on that road. So, you might not think costs that don't evenly map to dollars as equivalent, but clearly the market disagrees.
> around in circles on a private track.
Easily tracked and an exception could be made, but most people would not feel the savings as worth the effort. Remember laws are thousands of pages long first and second order objections can easily be included.
PS: In effect every road in the US is a toll road, you might not agree with the prices and exceptions but people still pay billions.
Not all vehicles that cause congestion even use gasoline, which is another reason for why trying to solve congestion with higher fuel taxes is a bad idea. Your Tesla is just as bad for congestion as a gas guzzler.
Even ignoring that, regional fuel charges don't fix the problem. There's plenty of big cities where you can drive in specific areas or at specific times without causing any congestion problems, which is why it makes sense to charge road tolls on specific roads at specific times.
Vehicles can also drive to different regions to fill up, which becomes a big problem of arbitrage if you try to make the regions too granular.