I disagree. Pretty much any economist will tell you that the best way to reduce consumption of a good is to increase its price.

By implementing congestion charges only those with a good enough reason to drive will do so, and give an incentive to use alternatives.

Will this disproportionally affect people with less money? Yeah, in the same way that everything that gets more expensive affects people with less money. People with less money have less of it to spend on things. They are now incentivized to find alternatives, creating demand for alternatives, therefore creating supply of alternatives.

If people still decide they want to burn more of their money driving, they are welcome to do so. No one is telling anyone how to spend their money. We are simply adjusting the price of a good to price in things that aren’t taken into account (traffic).

People arguing that congestion charges dispropropprtioanlly affect the poor often also support pricing in the true cost of other things, like carbon emissions and plastic bags. Are you saying you wouldn’t support a tax on plastic? Or emissions? Cap and trade? Those things also increase the prices of things we want to discourage the consumption of and also probably affect people with lower incomes disproportiaonately. You can’t have it both ways.