Everyone benefits from public roads even if they don't use them, though. Since the pandemic, I barely use the road network personally, but all the physical goo

Everyone benefits from public roads even if they don't use them, though. Since the pandemic, I barely use the road network personally, but all the physical goods I buy are transported over the roads, as are all the people who are employed to make them. From a financing perspective, I'm still an indirect road user. While it's certainly possible to levy pay-per-use charges for roads, so businesses would pass indirect costs onto their customers. However, it's debatable whether the economic costs of doing so much bookkeeping, as opposed to just funding the road network out of general taxes, is worth the trouble. Further, pay-per-use road pricing would involve serious invasions of privacy, and income equality impacts, for which the social costs arguably exceed any possible economic benefit. For public goods that literally everyone benefits from, it hardly seems to be worth the trouble to make sure everyone pays only their share down to the cent.