The standard deduction ($0.58/mi) is very high. The marginal cost of driving depends on how much you drive. Driving the US average 15,000mi/yr, you can buy a nicely-equipped Mazda 3, insure it, fuel it (at CA gas prices), and throw it away when the standard warranty expires every 5 years for $0.53/mi.
This cost is dominated by the production of the car and goes down almost linearly to something like $0.25/mi before maintenance would even be an issue.
This is cheaper than almost any other form of transport.
The road system is essentially free at this scale.
There are no significant subsidies that make this possible. It's just that cheap. And most of the cost is production – a positive-sum activity.
A congestion charge is a transfer payment (zero-sum). In general these should not be expected to significantly impact the value of civilization.
For one thing, the economy tends to route around them. A mortgage interest tax deduction causes house price inflation, for example. It's not clear there should be any long-run sensitivity of commuting times to commuting taxes. People are already paying their hourly wage to commute, and they will pay any tax on it also with that wage...
I think most people these days highly undervalue a system of roads that allows anyone to go to one place to another for the low cost of road construction/maintenance. Before paved roads and trucking, railroads basically charged monopoly rates to farmers, business, etc and extracted all extra money from the system. Unless water transportation was available. In that case competition kept railroad rates in check.
That said, I would say that congestion pricing could be a good thing for road building as it gives a value on building new ones. Hopefully the Boring Company can have some success and get tunneling prices down. Then with some idea of how much people will pay to not sit in traffic, we can get some tunnels built and start enjoying life again instead of sitting on congested freeways.
With enough high-speed tunnels one could convert all surface roads to max 25 mph mixed use and return the earth to the people like all those anti-car people dream of. Work for the win-win outcome.
This cost is dominated by the production of the car and goes down almost linearly to something like $0.25/mi before maintenance would even be an issue.
This is cheaper than almost any other form of transport.
The road system is essentially free at this scale.
There are no significant subsidies that make this possible. It's just that cheap. And most of the cost is production – a positive-sum activity.
A congestion charge is a transfer payment (zero-sum). In general these should not be expected to significantly impact the value of civilization.
For one thing, the economy tends to route around them. A mortgage interest tax deduction causes house price inflation, for example. It's not clear there should be any long-run sensitivity of commuting times to commuting taxes. People are already paying their hourly wage to commute, and they will pay any tax on it also with that wage...
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