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I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole of this search price hypothetical, because it serves no purpose to search people before they use the highway, whereas it averts a genuine tragedy of the commons to tax people for using the highway while it is congested.
Discussions of "rights" is complicated by the overlapping and charged definitions people have for the word. It can be used in a positivist negative sense (the actual freedom from government interference in doing something -- I have the right to speak my mind on the street corner), in a positivist positive sense (the actual ability to invoke the power of the government to overpower private parties who try to stop you from doing something or who refuse to facilitate it -- I have a right to see what data Google has collected about me), or in a morally-charged economic entitlement sense (the normative claim to third party or public resources to procure a good or service for yourself -- I have a right to food/shelter/medical care). There are other variations too. I think your argument is technically the positivist negative sense, but feels like it is reaching, subtly, to insinuate the economic entitlement sense too, which (if I'm right) I think would be begging the question.
In the realm of positivist negative rights, I certainly don't agree in general that people deserve compensation whenever they lose a right. Such a rule would lock our country into a state of sclerosis; every change in policy reshuffles all kinds of positivist rights, and requiring huge financial outlays to change the rules in any realm of society would mean the rules could never change and we'd quickly devolve. Your defense against public policy that is unfavorable to you is to participate in the political process, or in the extreme to exit the jurisdiction -- not to sue for compensation. Eminent domain does not generalize; it is a specific doctrine about taking land. It does not even apply when the government imposes easements on your land.
I also disagree that there's any kind of "efficient markets hypothesis" about when roads get built. That stuff is intensely political, riven by special interests, collective action problems, grift and idiosyncrasy. We are nowhere close. There's no plausible mechanism by which it would be.
Finally, the whole topic requires recognition that overcongested highways are a tragedy of the commons, in which aggregate value is destroyed by allowing overcongestion. That's the primary basis on which I support it. That's the source of scarcity of highway space. And in any place where there is scarcity, we apportion it by price or we suffer deadweight loss.
If you don't like the distributional consequences of apportioning scarce resources by price, address the consequences with general social safety nets. Make sure that anyone can afford to drive somewhere efficiently when they really need to, at least occasionally. That's better than the overcongested alternative can offer. But it doesn't require remitting congestion pricing revenue directly to non-drivers. It just requires remitting it to the fisc, as with any other government revenue, and writing checks from the government to poor people.
You don't agree with who? I had said:
I get the sense from most of your comment that by "not going down the rabbit hole", you meant, "I didn't read your comment."
Yeah, I didn't claim that, either. I said that we should design incentives to make it more efficient.
I agree 100%. Duly recognized, and not in contradiction with anything I've said.
I don't understand what the antecedent of "That" is in this sentence. Can you clarify?
Yeah, going back to, "You haven't read my comments." I have reiterated multiple times in the comments that I am not arguing for wealth redistribution or anything that would be otherwise satisfied with general social safety nets. You're arguing against a straw man and not really paying attention to what I've been saying. Good day.
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