To add to the information in this story (because I live in the neighborhood), there aren’t a ton of hotel options nearby, and all of the hotel options nearby are along the non-toll road freeways and all require a drive or ride share.
It's a gigantic family-owned plot of land, about 7000 acres (11 square miles, 28 km^2).
The Robinson family could have sold it all off to developers, but so far they have been very limited about that. Mostly they've just allowed stuff with obvious public benefit like a high school.
So the new Apple campus is on a major road, and one side it's suburbs, but on the other side, it's trees, grass, and (this being Texas) a bit of cactus.
More details: https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2018/12/15/a-primer-...
https://www.alamy.com/highway-interchange-or-multi-layered-h...
I think the commenters point, was that even if it an employee was staying literally across the highway from the campus, there would be no way to walk.
One you get to understand the road design in Texas, there are many advantages, such as their use of frontage roads and the ability to make u-turns under the highways without a traffic signal. But it generally speaks to the sprawl.
Our freeway system is ridiculous. We have a single interstate, multiple tolls and no 'loop' around the city. Houston and Dallas may be famous for their 8 lane highways but that is not how Austin is designed.
The funding rarely has anything to do with it. In nearly all cases road tolls are priced far in excess of what it takes to maintain that stretch of road and the money is then reallocated to other things.
What you're experiencing is that the toll deters other drivers from using that road, so there is less traffic on it. This is quite unegalitarian, because you're essentially creating a road for the upper class and then charging more than its maintenance cost to keep out the proles. Whereas if the tolls only covered maintenance of the toll road then the collection overhead would consume most of the money -- it's already not an insignificant cost even when the tolls are disproportionately high.
They also create a perverse incentive for the government to leave non-toll roads in disrepair to increase their toll revenue by pushing people to the toll road.
As far as un-egalitarian, I respectfully disagree. I’m sure there are people who can’t afford the toll costs, but “pay for what you use” seems perfectly reasonable to me. I guess that may be different if money is taken from the toll road as you described.
The large majority of road maintenance costs are attributable to weather and semi trucks. (Road damage from vehicles is the fourth power of vehicle weight, so one semi does as much damage as thousands of cars.)
Moreover, the problem with allocating the fixed cost (weather) portion of road maintenance to cars, or the cost attributable to large trucks, is then you over-deter use of the road. You don't want an inefficiency where you deter someone from using the road even though they value their use of it more than the cost to the state of allowing them to, because then you waste idle road capacity for which the fixed construction costs must be paid either way. Doing that also requires the amount of the toll to be even higher, because then you have to amortize the fixed costs over fewer vehicles. You end up with tolls much higher than the efficient level per vehicle even if the tolls do only pay for road maintenance, because of the over-deterrence.
The better solution is to pay the fixed cost portion from general taxes and only charge the marginal cost for usage.
But if you charge only the marginal cost for "light" passenger vehicles then the amount is so small as to not even be worth collecting.
Not walkable? That part's accurate though.