This is allocating public property, not personal.

The money raised by auctioning access is of some public benefit, but is it enough to offset the deep unfairness of the public granting, for example, software engineers a shorter commute on average than teachers?

Don't forget that having lanes which are guaranteed to be congestion-free is useful to everyone, not just the rich.

If you're in SF and you get a call that your mother is in the hospital in SJ and it's 5pm, you would happily pay $100 in tolls to get there (I think the actual price is less than $20).

Unfortunately, there is no practical way to do this other than by charging money to use the fast lane, and this means that the rich will get more of the scarce resources than the poor.

This is no big deal - it's kind of a tautology, if you really think about it.

This is allocating wear and tear on scarce highways. Dividing it evenly by use. Poor people who would never drive on this road should not be subsidizing the use by software engineers, for example (the non-toll model).

> for example, software engineers a shorter commute on average than teachers?

Housing prices already have this kind of effect -- highly compensated employees can afford to live closer to their preferred locations. There's no reason not to allocate road resources to the users who are willing to pay for them (which is a much broader segment of the population than just software engineers). Pricing is a better system than road communism.

Since the roads are paid for by taxes, the software engineers are paying more for them in the first place. Why shouldn't they get more of the benefit?

Because a civilized society is not about "who pays more gets the more benefit" from public infrastructure.

A dog-eats-dog jungle of underdeveloped monkeys in clothing, on the other hand, sure.

If it's a question of fairness, the guy you're replying to has a point. If it's a question of civilization... well, toll roads are kind of inextricable from civilized society.

It’s not an expensive good - its a commons. The HOV lanes are “rich people super freeways” they are there to help mass transit.

It's a scarce good, which loses most of its value if overused.

The standard Econ solution is to set a price that maximizes throughput. At least some toll roads are attempting to hit that price.

In the US, toll roads are required by law to maintain a certain minimum speed. The price is set based on that.

What law?

I suppose "regulation" would be more accurate, and it only applies to HOV lanes that receive funding from a specific source:

https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freewaymgmt/hovguidance/chapter4.ht...

This covers pretty much all of the lanes that people complain about so I'll stand by what I said.

That's interesting, but also a significantly narrower category than all toll roads.

Sure, but if the complaint is "this was a public road and now you're adding a toll lane" then this is what applies.

On this note, the "rich people super freeways" model actually does exist and works quite well, when implemented as a totally separate tolled highway that runs parallel to the toll-free one. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_407

>This is how money works. You're expressing anger at the concept of personal property.

The "this is how money works" argument doesn't work well for chattel slavery and it doesn't work well for this either...