In The Price Is Wrong: Why Our Roads Are So Clogged, Joseph Giglio explains that congestion pricing — charging to use roads at rush hour, when they’re busiest — is not a liberal policy but a conservative one:
This [Communist] approach is the way we’ve always allocated access to most roadways in capitalist America — access is “free,” just like for a public park. But our real cost skyrockets when we consider the time we spend crawling along in bumper-to-bumper traffic and with no option to pay extra for a faster trip.And even without factoring in the cost of time frittered away listening to satellite radio, highways have never really been “free,” but subsidized by taxpayer dollars. Congestion pricing is not a tax increase, but a user fee, which, conservatives agree, is a better way to divide costs. Indeed, economists across the political spectrum have long waxed enthusiastic about the superior logic of levying market-based prices for access to roadways; but until recently it remained little more than an interesting classroom concept since there was no practical way to charge motorists directly.
The advent of Electronic Toll Collection technology changed all this. Now we can charge motorists for using roadways without forcing them to stop at toll-booths, or even slow down.