Cars, and houses, are to a degree used for status signalling. With products like that, heavy taxes increase total utility since you can still have a nicer car/house than your poorer neighbour, it's just that all cars/houses have been bumped up a rung of show-offiness. Compare Europe to the USA for example. Even the American electric cars are comically large by euro standards.
(Other co-benefits are improved safety, an analysis of CARB regulations suggested that they paid for themselves just by reducing death and injury by encouraging lighter cars, even if you ignore air quality issues)
We do that here in the UK. The difference between a small economical car and a giant SUV is a factor of 5 (£110 for a small car vs £515 for a huge car, plus a couple of lower bands for electric and 'green' cars). It really isn't enough make anyone who wants to drive a big car choose something else. It needs to be more like 50 times more for a big car rather than 5, but politicians are too scared to introduce that.
Of course politicians should be the one who decide the rules. That's how democracy works...
Keep in mind that the jet fuel that's used to transport all the world's hipsters to “experience the world” is not taxed at all – or does that hit too close to home even for a person who doesn't own a car? A life that's aimed at solely minimising emissions is a bleak one, which is why it's not the will of the majority.
What about the jet fuel that's used for the other 98% of people who fly on a regular basis? Is that less polluting, or are you just jealous of the people who travel internationally for leisure? You're not making any sense, unless you're deluded enough to think that those are the only people who fly. "does that hit too close to home even for a person who doesn't own a car?"
Again, that makes no sense. Why would car ownership affect the impact of jet fuel pollution? If it's the "hipsters" you're concerned about, wouldn't those be the people who are already offsetting the environmental cost of air travel by using public transport and/or unmotorised travel and thus polluting less than car owners?
In other words, you seem to be more interested at attacking a threadbare strawman than evaluate what's actually happening. It's pretty sad, when the actual reason for taxation is pretty clear (to encourage less polluting methods of transport where one reasonably exists, which may not be the case for many air routes).
The real kicker? Jet fuel is actually taxed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
I understand that some governments have penalized car ownership by way of license plate restrictions and other tax situations (I've heard that license plates in China get auctioned for $12k USD because they're so rare). This turns owning a car into a vanity symbol for the wealthy. It may not even be an intentional symbol, but I'm sure that's the way it's perceived by those who don't own a car.
My point being that for some, car ownership isn't so bad. No need to go shaming people.
If you're courageous, you could live in downtown Dallas without a car (can move around a bit with DART). Making it harder to own a car (combined with more "dense-city" developments) doesn't seem like the worst idea. Mainly because we could recover the huuuge parking lots.
And when you want to go to Austin for the weekend you can rent a car.
In any case, even if the entire state is still very much "car necessary", you can still try to incentivise pockets of the state to be less so.
I've commuted by bike and public transportation for a number of years and I'd never want to ban vehicle ownership. A more workable solution would be to make driving tests less of a joke or to make dense areas of city centers car free zones. American cities are just too large and often times people drive without a destination in mind, like my Sunday drives down the California Public Highway along the beach.
Let's focus on the selfish car guy, that's the big picture all right in “saving” the world.
The "selfish car guy" is why the American lifestyle consumes twice as much as the Japanese lifestyle. Everything gets built around it.
And of course there's the fact that the American lifestyle gets exported to other places as well.
* Higher fuel consumption = some categories could be exempt, for example vans used by ONGs, firms and independent contractors.
* * Bigger cars = smaller cars are easier to park, take less space in traffic and make it overall more fluid, etc. I think exemptions could be made here for the categories I mentioned previously and for families with children, for example.
Plus, taxing per gallon is exactly proportional to the burden on society.
An extra 50 cents per gallon is quite a bit, but it doesn't seem to discourage this behavior. 40% on the price of the car instead... could make a lot more people think twice about the purchase.
For shorter distances, great bicycling infrastructure helps a lot. Buses are nice but cycling is often as fast, with the benefit of being completely door to door and leaving exactly when you want to. But this benefit only works if people feel completely safe on the road, which means mostly seperate cycle paths, and removing cars from the busy city centers. Not having cars there makes shopping more attractive, because it's now easier to walk from store to the store across the road.
That same infrastructure then also helps make trains more attractive, because you can set up cheap bike hire at stations. This then means your journey can be bike-train-bike door to door, rather than walk-bus-train-bus-walk (or worse).
It's a complicated connected mesh of things.
Also, many professions require high levels of mobility.
Finally, unless you introduce some kind of permit system and create serious beaurocracy for enforcing it, people will just pretend to have their own companies and drive "company" cars anyway.
Nature will find a way :)
And I say this while taking 50% of my trips with public transit (the rest with Uber). I seriously hope we get rid of gas cars one way, but banning private ownership would be crazy.
In Belgium we have busses that only drive if you call them up first https://www.delijn.be/en/belbus/
Public transport underdeveloped -> more people use personal transport -> public transport develops even less, city develops around personal transport -> vicious circle.
Of course the individual it's a purely not victim, but in certain contexts, using the car is a necessity. In such cases, a strong collective effort should be made to reverse the situation.