Didn’t they have those costs while they paid off the bridge? They were able to meet those costs and maintain the bridge.
I’ll bet you would be astounded to know how much money the Golden Gate Bridge takes in each year.
They obviously did have maintenance costs while paying off the bridge, and that of course delayed the “paid off” date by quite a bit. The costs would have been somewhat lower when the bridge was relatively new, and both monetary and generalized cost inflation (the latter largely due to excessive government regulation and the now completely out of control tort liability system) would mean substantially higher maintenance costs now. I’m sure you’re right that a significant chunk of the toll revenue is being diverted to pay for mass transit, but I’m also sure that the vast majority of bridge users approve of that, and that there are also a lot of San Francisco area taxpayers who think a great deal more ought to spent on mass transit (given that SF is chock full of impractical wild-eyed enviroweenies).
My general sense is that the use of toll and gas tax revenues are generally in line with what the people paying them want them to be used for. This is such an incredibly better scenario than what we have with funding of public schools, welfare/AFDC/public housing, Medicaid, etc — in which the payers are overwhelmingly not the beneficiaries of the programs and to a great extent also disapprove of the very nature and/or extent of them — that it’s not even on my radar screen of things to worry about, and I don’t think it will be any time soon.