Bingo. If getting to work at 9 AM costs me five times more than getting to work at 7, you can be sure I'll figure out a way to do the latter. Motivating large chunks of the population to think about rush hour would be a "good thing".
> What if you are a fireman and you need to get to your shift? Can those burning people wait?
There's no particular reason emergency service shift changes need to be synced to the common business day -- indeed, my intuition would be that accident timing patterns would make this a bad idea independent of traffic impacts -- but there's also no reason that employers with employees for which they have strong fixed-time needs couldn't subsidize (or, in the case of public necessity where the employer is the government, exempt) their employees traffic fees.
> Can everyone dynamically shift business routines due to "demand"?
Yes, they can -- but, of course, there is a cost (which varies from situation to situation) in doing so. Of course, there's also a cost -- particularly an externalized cost born by others -- of traffic. If you effectively internalize the external cost (i.e., make it born by the people making the decision to engage in the action), then behavior should reflect the true costs and benefits resulting from the action.
