alt Hacker NewsAll roads and their usage comes at a cost, toll roads just at more of a cost due to their additional overheads. What you end up with is a more expensive path that disincentivizes a public path there. Drivers on it pay the overheads of the tolls, drivers avoiding it continue to pay more in gas and wear. Everyone would pay less if it were just a public path.
Seems to me you are focused on money rather than time here. However, people using these road are not in alignment with that metric. What’s important is not the cost, but the value. Why choose a toll road over a public path from A to B? It’s all about saving time—that’s the value the transaction provides those users.
If a toll road becomes public, its value goes away because traffic increases on it, eliminating any benefit of traffic reduction that provides time savings that the gate keeping of the charging a toll provides. Also this notion of “everyone now bears the cost of the road” creates damage. That cost now hits the folks who don’t want to use it currently because they do not see its value. All you have done is hurt both the drivers of the road and the drivers who do not use the road by “sharing the burden” and making it public.