OK I’m way out here in West Texas where we have one interstate highway that I rarely travel, but to be honest I have no problem taxing the people who actually use the road as opposed to taxing everybody. Tobacco has a separate Tax, alcohol has a separate Tax, oil, gas an it’s byproducts have a separate Tax. Now with that said I would only agree if there was an overall drop in the per gallon gas Tax.
“I have no problem taxing the people who actually use the road...”
What gets our backs up is when the money is DIVERTED to ‘other priorities’, such as public buses in big cities (as is being done in Houston, and was proposed for Pennsylvania). The cost to maintain highways, particularly in West Texas is next to nothing...but the amount of value they provide for transport is huge - which is why public tolling rates are usually several times the cost of what a freeway would have cost - and private operations, the ones that really get us pissed, are usually 10 to 20 times the cost of maintaining the road, as the investors have to ‘buy-in’ to get control of the road - in other words, give billions to the state governments for putting up the toll booths...and, of course, they then have to recover that money.