In essence, the "unlimited free road consumption" created the disaggregation of decentralized, low-density suburban regions from the high-density commercial districts, which predates that concept by several decades.
Subsidized roads creates an arbitrage that allows people to live away from their jobs. This concentrates commercial activity, i.e. it creates commercial-only zones and residential-only zones that are far away from each other. Prior to that, people lived and worked in the same area. These were very dense areas, but the economic activity of the region wouldn't be described as concentrated because there was no gradient to low-activity surroundings.
Obviously actual zoning policies play a (significant) role here as well.
Transportation allows people to live far from where they work, but that's everything from horses to bullet trains.
Free roads allow for dispersed uses but doesn't affect how dense of segregated they are. Beyond the cost and space requirements to park everyone's cars. Zoning is doing almost all the work you're describing - even with the presence of cars and subsidized highways, the built environment would look very different without zoning and with more market forces.
And no, cost of land and ease of transit is a far more powerful force than zoning. Look at Houston.
Which one is it? Is it free or were there tolls?
This comment thread is talking about the general dynamics of commutes.
Unlimited free or near-free road consumption is the norm across the entire US. NYC in particular has always been ahead of the curve in mitigating this. The bridge tolls are obviously not priced anywhere close to the value of crossing the bridge, or else land values would be the same on both sides of the bridge.
I suspect this isn't actually hard to follow and you're just getting irritated for some reason.
Roads are funded with taxes. How does that make them free? The main source of road funding in the US are property taxes and gas taxes, followed by things like license plate tabs (mine were ~$2500 last year).
> The bridge tolls are obviously not priced anywhere close to the value of crossing the bridge, or else land values would be the same on both sides of the bridge
Nothing about that is obvious, nor does your explanation make any sense. We should only invest in infrastructure if the costs to utilize it are equivalent to its benefits? That's not what we do with anything. Why build a bridge that provides no positive benefit to the people using it?
Road creation and maintenance are funded by taxes. Road consumption is generally free or near-free. These are distinct concepts.
> Nothing about that is obvious, nor does your explanation make any sense.
A simple case of disequilibrium doesn't make sense to you? The two sides are clearly of unequal value. If the act of crossing them costed as much as that difference, then the two sides would equalize.
> We should only invest in infrastructure if the costs to utilize it are equivalent to its benefits? That's not what we do with anything. Why build a bridge that provides no positive benefit to the people using it?
Nope! Not sure how you got from a description of how prices work and clear empirical evidence of price imbalances to a normative argument about what we should do. As I've stated explicitly elsewhere in the thread, the goal is not to completely eliminate the imbalance. I'm saying the existence of price differences and the arbitrage between the two sides of the bridges are clear evidence there is an imbalance.