Exactly the opposite. Pay for use is the essence of individuals paying for the services and infrastructure they use.
I also would 100% support eliminating the gas tax and charging for each and every mile everyone uses. Only at the state level the fed has no charter or enumerated powers to be building roads, it’s not in the constitution. Also base the rate of the per mile charge on the mathematical formula of tire pressure PSI per square foot since it’s proven road wear goes up at the quad power of weight it’s 16 times higher for double the psi weight. Trucks should pay way more per mile vs small cars like sedans s one truck does 16,000 times the wear rate of a sedan per mile.
Pay for use is the only real equitable way to finance use. Right now the average person drives 14500 miles per year and has a fleet avg 25 mpg. That’s 580 gallons per year the federal gas tax is 18 cents per gallon that works out to just over $108 per year in federal tax revenue from gas taxes per individual if you think $108 to the federal government even remotely covers the infrastructure cost wear and tear and maintenance of any road system your delusional. most of the highway funds the feds give out comes from the general tax pool which means the higher income tax paying people are paying for all the roads as the higher income people pay a disproportionately large portion of the federal government’s revenue. This is the essence of progressive taxation. The bottom half of income doesn’t pay next taxes famously the 47% it’s higher now. So when daddy fed gives motorway mmoney it’s from the top half while the bottom half drives for free. $108 is essentially free it won’t cover a single foot of roadway costs in a year. Motorways are $2-11 MILLION per mile that’s $378 to $2000+ PER FOOT. Yeah your gas tax doesn’t even cover a single foot of road in a year. Oh but the state gas taxes. “8.95 cents per gallon in Alaska to 68.1 cents per gallon in California as of January 2024”
So $53-394 per year, here again on average not even a foot of roadway. So eliminate the gas tax and tax by actual usage so everyone had a skin in the game. It is by definition equality. Drive more ,use more, pay more.
Even those who don’t drive on roads benefit from goods and services delivered by them.
That argument played out in the early 1800s. The first National Road was authorized by Congress in 1802 and constructed from 1811 through the 1830s.
That matter was a subject of great dispute in the U.S. government at the time -- for the reasons you have laid out about the limits of federal power.
There's a reason why the "Federalist" view won the day, and the timing of that first federal appropriation for the National Road had everything to do with it. If you look at a map of the original thirteen states and you review the history of the colonies, you'll see two obvious historical and geographical points that informed the founders' views on transportation infrastructure when they drafted the Constitition:
1. Every one of the original thirteen states was located on the Atlantic seaboard.
2. There was already a network of government-owned roads in place in these thirteen states from the time of British colonial rule. These "king's roads" became the "post roads" that are cited in the U.S. Constitution under the enumerated powers of the federal governments.
Most commerce between the original states took place via marine shipping or along these "post roads." If the U.S. never grew beyond these 13 states, nothing ever would have needed to change.
The conversations about building a national road system beyond these original "post roads" began very soon after the Constitution was ratified. With the admission of Vermont (1791), Kentucky (1792) and Tennessee (1796), the U.S. now had sovereign states within its borders that did NOT have direct access to Atlantic ports. There wasn't much urgency in addressing this, however, since these three states were very rural and encompassed lands that had previously been subject to claims among one or more of the original 13 states. So their limitations were well established and understood by everyone at the time.
It was the admission of Ohio into the Union in 1803 that brought the whole question to a head in Congress. Under a strict interpretation of the Constitution, the U.S. government might have had no authority to construct a new road between states. However, the powers at the time -- including Thomas Jefferson himself, who was very much a champion of state's rights -- recognized that every new state admitted to the Union that lay west of the Appalachian Mountains would have limited ties to the rest of the U.S. unless they could maintain and grow commerce throughout the nation without being subject to the whims of their neighboring states when it came to the construction and maintenance of roadways.
That original National Road was established to run west from Cumberland, Maryland across a route that is now roughly followed by I-70 and Route US-40. It was considered a "no brainer" at the time because without such a road in place, the Northwest Territory -- which included a large region in the interior of North America that later became Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota -- would have closer commercial ties to British Canada than to the rest of the United States.
So there you have the REST of the story ...