I think the idea is to penalize car ownership in places where you "shouldn't" need one.

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.