I think your proposal is sound...the people that get primary benefit of the infrastructure should be the ones that pay for it. Unfortunately, that causes more

I think your proposal is sound...the people that get primary benefit of the infrastructure should be the ones that pay for it. Unfortunately, that causes more problems for drivers than it does for transit riders (which is why we are in the current state that we are in). You see, the cost structure of automobiles is linear, and when you throw in density, exponential. The cost structure for transit is inverse to its ridership (within vehicle capacity limits). In other words, small increases in ridership produce huge decreases in costs per passenger. So much so that the most heavily used transit systems in the world are completely profitable (Hong Kong's MTR is an exceptionally profitable publicly traded corporation). Now currently, both roads and transit systems are subsidized. But since they are substitutes (in the economic definition), a small decrease in subsidies to roads will push more people to transit, thus requiring fewer subsidies to transit. But we can't have that, can we?