>In the worst cases, it could even become a regressive tax of sorts.

When I lived in Atlanta, there were people, mostly YIMBYs and other urbanists, who wanted to charge a significant congestion fee to anyone living in surrounding towns like Alpharetta, Roswell, Duluth, etc., who commuted into the city to work.

It would effectively be a car vice tax paid by the working class, as most of the people I knew out there lived there because Atlanta rents and home prices are insane.

Congestion pricing is ok when there are alternate methods of transportation that are usable enough that you could expect a person to just switch to them rather than pay the fee. But when there's not such an alternative, the people will simply pay the fee because they have no other option, and now you've just further immiserated peoples' lives.

The closest thing to a response I've heard is that they think such a situation would encourage people to vote and push for better transit options. I just don't see it though. Ignoring that in my case, Atlanta, the city was a de facto one party city in which primaries were mostly determined by media endorsements and more emotional issues than transit and urbanism development, I just don't see that this kind of policy making that shapes the incentives (both carrot and stick) for the masses works in practice. Peoples' decisions are so much more complicated and subject to tons of other factors that this approach can't control.