There was a discussion on a different post pointing out that maintenance of a highway is still very costly. Charging only the users, rather than all taxpayers, appears very fair.
Charging by road use definitely seems fair, but it's a problem when you have 50 major roads in the state and by historical accident only say 2 of them get tolled. North-South travellers end up subsidising East-West travellers or vice versa.
It's hard to come up with a perfectly fair system. Tolling every road is expensive and tax on fuel has its own trade offs.
The irony of this discussion is we're talking about Florida. A place where absolutely no one really should be living in the first place. The eastern seaboard is just a bunch of infilled swamp, which was more valuable as swamp.
Most importantly because no toll means (the feeling of) more privacy, toll means you're being tracked. Regardless of law we all know that everything eveywhere gets stored indefinitely independent of country (if not legally then illegally if not by the toll org then by the secret service).
Secondly the country I was in with the toll approach had worse infrastructure.
Thirdly, when looking at government spending as a whole, road infrastructure (in a non tollroad country) is really not that big of an expenditure as far as I know?
Forthly, a country may (and some do) still tax road-users only by just taxing car ownership periodically. No need to invade privacy for that through toll booths or even worse: mandatory tracking devices (countries in Europe are pushing for the latter). Added bonus: you can trivially put a tax on relatively polluting vehicles if you like and use that to subsidize less polluting vehicles.
That would have been better in the past, but doesn't work so well with electric vehicles.
Ideally, vehicles should be charged in relation to approximately the fourth power of their weight as that is proportional to the road damage. However, that will drastically change the economics of logistics companies.
Not necessarily, but governments would need to be transparent about subsidising logistics.. instead of the current state where this is done covertly by taxing little vehicles disproportionately.
Superficially maybe, but it's much more complicated than that. When an efficient public transport exists between two places there are derivative economic benefits all round, a larger pool of employees for businesses in A, more demand for housing in B etc.
Depends if you think roads should be run as a public service, free to all at the point of use, and paid for by all according to their means, or a private service (with or without profit).
Do you also think the same about parks? Or schools? Or police? Or healthcare? Or water? Or rail? Or defence?
Infrastructure provides public benefits way in excess of the private benefit to the users, which is why roads have been public projects for millennia. People generally travel on roads to get somewhere and do something, and given increased state capacity, that thing is overwhelmingly likely to be taxable.
Toll roads are a holdover from times of reduced state capacity when the best and only way to tax something was to force it to go through a physical chokepoint.
If the thing they use the infrastructure to do is actually valuable, then they can just add the cost of the toll to what they charge for doing it. Splitting the cost of building and maintaining infrastructure among users is, I believe, the fairest way, and helps to avoid market distortions.
Since I live on the Danish island of Zealand, everything transported from more than about 150km away has paid a toll of some kind -- either the bridge toll from the rest of Denmark (and thence Germany), the bridge/tunnel toll to Sweden, or the ferry to Germany.
I'm fine with that. FedEx's lorry will pay 960DKK (€130) to cross the bridge, and they will add that price to the price of delivery.
It's hard to come up with a perfectly fair system. Tolling every road is expensive and tax on fuel has its own trade offs.