You don’t have to be wealthy to pay to use them, you just have to value the time savings more than others. Imagine a “poor” person late for their job where they will get fired, they might value the lane more than a “rich” person just cruising around for fun. Whereas if it weren’t an option at all the poor person in this scenario loses their job and is strictly worse off.

i don’t agree with the notion that everything provided by the government must be free at point of use, seems like a childish and foolish way of running a society with real resource constraints.

Also isn’t it more fair to charge people using the roads than everyone? What if someone doesn’t even drive should they have to pay taxes for roads?

And in the absence of these congestion fees we’d likely have to take taxes overall. That would probably be even worse for poor people.