The point of the article is that you're paying one way or another. Roads aren't free to build and/or maintain... in fact, it's extremely expensive to build and maintain them. It's just that all levels of gov't have allowed revenues from the gas tax get inflated away by both regular inflation and increased fuel efficiency.

Determining who pays to maintain these systems is a political decision, but it certainly makes sense that we should really be charging people who use them. Adding a luxury tax to folks who want to skip traffic seems like a free lunch for everyone else. At the end of the day, suburbanites want to force the rural and urban dwellers to subsidize their primary mode of transportation (large, dense highways), but it's becoming more and more politically untenable.

I think the most important thing to think about here, is how this affects long term real estate values and development patterns. Regardless of whether there are tolls or a higher gas tax, the current suburban development pattern is going to get more and more expensive for the end users, but you could have learned that from Strong Towns a decade ago.