[jcims]

It seemed like you were positing public transit and bike infrastructure as an alternative to cars...particularly as a money saving and healthy alternative to those 'who are barely scraping by after the pandemic who have no leeway in their budget for an auto tax increas'

This may be true in some areas, but not most.

[acdha]

My point was that the shear inefficiency of low-use single passenger vehicles is expensive but it’s baked into the system so we tend not to notice it. Cars are a significant expense, along with the cost of insurance, maintenance, fuel, parking, taxes to pay for roads & subsidized parking, etc. but it’s so normalized that even if they’re just scraping by most people think of it as an unavoidable necessity.

The problem is that we spent most of the 20th century designing the country around cars, and especially discouraging transit as something generally for poor/brown people. Even in cities which have things like subways, urban design almost always massively prioritized suburban commuters over transit users. People make horrible financial decisions because having a big, late model vehicle is such a social status signal.

The problem is changing that puts us in a prisoner’s dilemma: on an individual level in much of the country it’s best to keep piling your money into a depreciating mostly-idle asset because you need a critical mass of riders for transit to be cost effective. Using things like higher gas taxes to pay for things like road maintenance and pollution remediation can work well but people who are used to being subsidized will complain bitterly as soon as you ask them to pay the true cost for what they use.