OT: Muppets

Yes. Gas taxes.

Gas taxes don't have much to do with paying for the highway system, and the damage to the highway system goes up a lot faster with vehicle weight than does fuel consumption (which is largely devoted to coping with air-resistance).

The biggest single cost of the highway system is the interest on the capital devoted to building it in the first place, and if you allow it to get clogged up by too many cars you are wasting that investment.

There are no small number of toll roads around here and not only do they pay their way, they make a huge profit. So much so that tolls that were supposed to only last for the 20 years it would take to pay off a bond for its construction were paid off in 8 years and the tolls remained because no one in government wanted to lose that income.

Then there are the private toll roads that are paid for by a private business while sharing the income with the government. Clearly toll roads can be very profitable even if not popular.

pay

no

Toll roads cherry-pick the traffic. If there wasn't a huge publicly funded highway system to feed cars into the toll road, and take them away again af ter they'd used the toll road, the toll roads would be a whole lot less pro fitable.

Pick your choke point and put a toll road through it. Neal Stephenson talke d about the way the French imported the wood for their naval vessels from t he Baltic countries, when the woods of France were full of just the right s ort of trees. The problem was that the local barons owned the rivers down t o the ports where the woods was turned into boats, and every last one of th em charged a fee on every last bit of wood that crossed his property. It wa s cheaper to ship the wood through the Baltic and around the North Sea coas t than it was to pay an endless succession of road and river tolls.