The Streets Were Never Free. Congestion Pricing Finally Makes That Plain.

Congestion pricing has the potential to significantly change how traffic flows through Manhattan streets, how commuters get around the city, how companies like Uber and Lyft operate.

But most radically, if the policy spreads it could challenge a deeply embedded cultural idea, requiring people to pay for something Americans have long demanded — and largely believe they’ve gotten — free of charge.

The idea of the open road evokes these intertwined meanings: The freedom to use it should be free. Residential street parking should be free. Traffic lanes should be free. Stretches of public curb dedicated to private driveways? Those should be free, too.

In other ways, the government has heavily subsidized driving, or hidden the reality of who pays for it in places no one sees. Local laws require off-street parking from businesses and housing developers, who pass on the construction cost of it to tenants and customers who may not drive at all.

Federal and state governments fund roads with gas taxes that feel far removed from a direct user fee (and that have come to operate like less and less of one in an era of fuel efficiency).

“They add up to a pretty giant system of subsidies,” said Michael Manville, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But they don’t look like what we often consider subsidies.”

This system looks to us, instead, like an entitlement — driving is an American right, and so the infrastructure that enables it should be free.

Congestion pricing is premised instead on the notion that public roads are a valuable and scarce resource. And we should pay in some places to use it not primarily to gin up revenue, but to help manage access for everyone.

“It’s a huge departure from how we’ve culturally thought about this over the years,” said Kari Watkins, a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

In reality, the government is a monopoly provider of road space, and the government has largely chosen to give it away. It’s no surprise, then, that the vast majority of American commuters drive to work alone, or that all those lonely commuters (plus taxis, Ubers, buses and delivery trucks) cause congestion.

When the government holds down the price of something people value, Mr. Manville said, we get shortages. And congestion is effectively a shortage of road — one that occurs at the peak times when people want to use it most.

If we had that problem with other kinds of infrastructure or commodities, we’d charge people more for them. If airline tickets were particularly in demand, their prices would go up. If there were a run on avocados, grocers wouldn’t respond by keeping them as cheap as possible.

“The roads hold such a special position in our brain that we use logic around them that we would never use around everything else,” Mr. Manville said.

Other countries have socialized health care, parental leave or housing, Jeffrey Tumlin, a transportation consultant at Nelson\Nygaard, pointed out. In America, we’ve socialized driving — and housing for our cars.

“We don’t let people put their self-storage containers in public parks, but it’s just fine to store their cars on other public land for free,” Mr. Tumlin wrote in an email.

Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia, traces this thinking to the 1920s and ’30s, when industry groups and government officials were debating whether to fund America’s expanding roads with tolls, which were by then common on bridges.

Road builders were happy to have tolls, and they appeared in places like the Pennsylvania Turnpike. But auto clubs and car manufacturers dependent on car sales opposed them. They preferred a gas tax, a cost less visible to drivers every time they got in a car. Together, they were remarkably savvy about branding the choice as one between “toll roads and free roads.” (A 1939 federal report even adopted that phrase as its title.)

“Of course, there’s no such thing as a free road,” Mr. Norton said. “But they were making the ambiguous association between their cause and the great cause of freedom.”

Industry publications at the time linked the need for “free” roads to patriotism, the Bill of Rights, even the Minutemen.

Today, because most people seldom pay directly for roads — or because general funds do — it can seem as if no one does.

“Therefore the street transportation system has no cost,” said Yonah Freemark, a doctoral student in city planning at M.I.T., who runs the blog The Transport Politic. “And therefore we can just expect to have unlimited parking, we can expect to have unlimited access to neighborhoods, for whatever reason, for free.”

Take those expectations to their logical conclusion in a major city today, and you get 10-mile-per-hour road speeds, rampant double parking, clogged intersections and worsening commute times. You get, finally, the political will for congestion pricing.

Now the culture of limitless, cheap driving may begin to shift in some places. But it will take much longer to change the physical environment that has grown up around that culture over decades, leaving many people without good alternatives to driving alone.

Where there are few other choices, like reliable bus routes, congestion pricing risks burdening poorer drivers in particular. But that is a problem we’ve thought about before, too, Mr. Manville said, if we’re now willing to treat roads as we do other infrastructure. He pointed to “lifeline” utility services: subsidized rates for electricity and gas offered to users with fewer resources.

“Fortunately, congestion pricing comes with its own built-in solution,” he said, “which is that it raises a ton of money.”