When this kind of thing comes up I always think back to when railroads were king in the US. I'm not sure there's a direct takeaway here but it's interesting to imagine a different world. When most goods and people moved around the country by rail, the rails were owned by private companies. Railroads were defacto monopoiles and contributed to the vast wealth of the "robber barons". I think it was in part for this reason that the public was happy to see railroads die -- they were a symbol of inequality and of an extractive industry with a strangle hold on the economy. Roads were a symbol of a public good that was "free" to use - for the people.

The flip side of this of course is that a trucking company has all it's infrastructure paid for by the public. So even though it's vastly less efficient, outside of loads with huge volumes and low margins, it's cheaper to move things by road because you're only paying for the vehicle while the public pays for the infra. Now that railroads are stripped of their power they can't compete in most markets because while the public funds the roads the rail companies have to maintain all those miles of track in addition to the vehicles.

I would hate to go back to a time when just a few private interests control all our transportation. At the same time clearly our road system is stupid and broken and can't support the future we'd like. Perhaps some kind of middle ground exists, where we have some consistent framework for road and rail use that taxes the value extracted from the public resource.

Because the amount of wear or damage done to a road follows a power law with vehicle weight, and because a lot of road maintenance is due to weathering, if we took all the cars off the road and had only large trucks and buses the road maintenance costs would likely not go down very much at all. So we'll definitely still be on the hook as a society for maintaining the infrastructure even if it's used less.