The way I see it is that the existing road network is an enormous public capital investment that is permitted to woefully underperform due to political pressure

The way I see it is that the existing road network is an enormous public capital investment that is permitted to woefully underperform due to political pressure to make roads cheap or essentially free. The idea that roads are "breaking even" when you roughly balance road spending and money raised from roads is artificial. Given the huge historical capital investment states have made in their roads they should be making money; or if they are not, we should be acknowledging that we are choosing to not make money at market rates when we compare the costs involved with roads with other forms of transport (especially rail). I don't think we should necessarily do anything different with roads, but we should acknowledge that, well, pretty much everything at this scale needs to be subsidized out the wazoo - roads as well as public transport. I'm not arguing for some sort of dystopia where the government does some crazy user-pays thing on even public asset; just an end to the endless rhetoric about how roads "break even" while public transport "needs to be subsidized".