Well, one practical response to this is that the toll lanes do not really cause other lanes to be slower (than what it was before), even though it feels like so

Well, one practical response to this is that the toll lanes do not really cause other lanes to be slower (than what it was before), even though it feels like some group is being allowed to bypass everyone else. In the sense that -- suppose that you have a 4 lane highway. Adding a 5th lane will actually not help much to increase the capacity of the highway if it is traffic-bottlenecked. For certain traffic volumes and lane configurations, adding lanes doesn't increase throughput. So having a toll lane basically just helps to generate revenue from people who are willing to pay (and allow those who are willing to pay to drive slightly faster past traffic), while not significantly slowing down most other people (who already experienced congestion in certain stretches of highway before this). Now, whether this feels fair and is a good idea is a different question (and clearly generates a lot of opinions).