Sorry, I don't understand the relevance here.
> It's just that the "use" for information is nearly free, so it doesn't make sense to charge for usage.
Exactly. It's easy to provide the information to essentially infinite people for free, and there's no real downside to doing so.
> If the road was already completely paid for by tax-payers (no debt), and then a toll company wanted to operate the road for a 99% margin - you'd see a lot more people complaining about that.
For sure. Of course, real world charges for roads/parking is a little more complicated than that.
> Street parking is an interesting example in that the demand charge is probably unrelated to the underlying cost. However, it's just one of the many examples of taking tax dollars from Pot A to pay for things in Pot B.
Yeah, the most obvious reason to do this for street parking is because you actively want to manage demand of a highly demanded, finite resource. You don't really need the money, but charging gets you other changes you want. Ditto for congestion charges.
