> Take the revenue generated from congestion pricing, and put it into public transportation.
Public transportation is often not viable for the car-centric design of many American communities. The above is necessarily to do, but development probably also needs to also change to pre-WW2 designs:
I disagree with that take generally. What is the difference between say a UK garden suburb and a new build suburb outside dallas? The commuter rail station really. UK suburbs are similarly labyrinthine. But actually, the dallas suburbs have great bones for a potential transit network. Even though the residential streets themselves look like they were laid out by wandering livestock just like they were in the UK, they have the great advantage of being rigidly bounded by generally 1x1 mile square, cardinal, arterial road networks which are very wide public right of ways. One could just lay a network of brt or lrt or heavy commuter rail on top of this space without even needing to acquire any property at all. And if the stations were say on each 1x1 mile intersecting node, everyone in the inner residential portion would theoretically only be a half mile or closer from their nearest transit stop, as the crow flies at least.
The only real issue is that these transit offerings are not being invested in at all. Not at the level of road expansion investment anyhow. Not that they wouldn't be possible to offer or that the built environment somehow precludes them.
We're talking about cities that would benefit from congestion pricing. If there's enough traffic to need congestion pricing, then it could immediately benefit from public transit.
I don't understand why folks always take this as an all or nothing thing. We don't need to redesign the suburbs. They're the ones causing the congestion, and they're also the ones benefiting from free roads. Taxing them to cover the their own externalities makes sense. If public transit is available and better than driving cars, the suburbs will either support them via redesign, or they'll pay the tax for the luxury of driving a car into a city they don't live in.
The only real issue is that these transit offerings are not being invested in at all. Not at the level of road expansion investment anyhow. Not that they wouldn't be possible to offer or that the built environment somehow precludes them.