> since the dedicated funding gives them the money to maintain and expand the road as needed.
The funding rarely has anything to do with it. In nearly all cases road tolls are priced far in excess of what it takes to maintain that stretch of road and the money is then reallocated to other things.
What you're experiencing is that the toll deters other drivers from using that road, so there is less traffic on it. This is quite unegalitarian, because you're essentially creating a road for the upper class and then charging more than its maintenance cost to keep out the proles. Whereas if the tolls only covered maintenance of the toll road then the collection overhead would consume most of the money -- it's already not an insignificant cost even when the tolls are disproportionately high.
They also create a perverse incentive for the government to leave non-toll roads in disrepair to increase their toll revenue by pushing people to the toll road.
That may be true generally - I have no idea - but it definitely isn’t in Illinois.
The tolls stay in the system and don’t support any non-tolled roads. If anything the subsidies go the other way, since cities will pay to have a ramp built that will then generate tolls for the main highway. I have no idea what percentage of the toll goes to collection costs.
As far as un-egalitarian, I respectfully disagree. I’m sure there are people who can’t afford the toll costs, but “pay for what you use” seems perfectly reasonable to me. I guess that may be different if money is taken from the toll road as you described.
"Pay for what you use" in the case of roads would be the incremental amount of road damage caused by each vehicle, rather than the total road cost divided by the number of vehicles.
The large majority of road maintenance costs are attributable to weather and semi trucks. (Road damage from vehicles is the fourth power of vehicle weight, so one semi does as much damage as thousands of cars.)
Moreover, the problem with allocating the fixed cost (weather) portion of road maintenance to cars, or the cost attributable to large trucks, is then you over-deter use of the road. You don't want an inefficiency where you deter someone from using the road even though they value their use of it more than the cost to the state of allowing them to, because then you waste idle road capacity for which the fixed construction costs must be paid either way. Doing that also requires the amount of the toll to be even higher, because then you have to amortize the fixed costs over fewer vehicles. You end up with tolls much higher than the efficient level per vehicle even if the tolls do only pay for road maintenance, because of the over-deterrence.
The better solution is to pay the fixed cost portion from general taxes and only charge the marginal cost for usage.
But if you charge only the marginal cost for "light" passenger vehicles then the amount is so small as to not even be worth collecting.
The funding rarely has anything to do with it. In nearly all cases road tolls are priced far in excess of what it takes to maintain that stretch of road and the money is then reallocated to other things.
What you're experiencing is that the toll deters other drivers from using that road, so there is less traffic on it. This is quite unegalitarian, because you're essentially creating a road for the upper class and then charging more than its maintenance cost to keep out the proles. Whereas if the tolls only covered maintenance of the toll road then the collection overhead would consume most of the money -- it's already not an insignificant cost even when the tolls are disproportionately high.
They also create a perverse incentive for the government to leave non-toll roads in disrepair to increase their toll revenue by pushing people to the toll road.