What can we do?
Easiest way to accomplish that is with more energy.
Just as an example, people who advocate for getting rid of parking, to make it harder to drive.
Instead, make life easier, so they want to use public transit.
And that means not making existing solutions worse, but rather focus only on making the new stuff better. And if that turns out to be impossible to do, then public transit is simply not a solution.
If you want to improve buses, you need more of them, you need dedicated bus lanes, you need to give buses priority at intersections, and you need to modify road layouts in regards to things like one-way streets. All of these markedly improve quality of life for bus passengers, but also reduce the quality and convenience of personal car transport.
Similarly, if you need to expand a rail or subway network, you need a lot of roadworks and construction, which inconveniences drivers. For streetcars, you combine the impacts of bus and rail improvements.
Simply put, car drivers have been receiving preferential treatment in cities for far too long, and it's about time they were relegated to second-class transport, behind buses and rail.
If you think it's better, go for it, make it so good people want it, and maybe I'll go for it. But do so without making things worse for anyone else.
I know what you are thinking "but my way is so obviously so much better, that of course we should give it priority". Except I disagree, I think public transit is horrible.
And I'm saying this because I tried it, using it exclusively in a city with probably the worlds best public transit. It was horrible, I would never trade my car for that. And I would never live in a city that required me to.
Like I said, after a certain point, you will have to choose to downgrade other forms of transport, in order to optimize the ones you choose.
Why do you think public transport is horrible and worthless?
Where did you live? Because I live in Copenhagen, which in my experience has the very best public transport system in the world. Usage and popularity is very high, and a lot of people bike as well, also great for easing congestion.
Is it annoying when the bus is packed full and you get squeezed a bit? Yeah, but it generally only happens when there's an unforeseen delay on one of the main lines in the middle of rush hour. Another bus will come in 5 minutes, with fewer people on it.
Are some routes a little odd? Yeah, it takes me 35 minutes to get to my girlfriend, compared to 15 minutes by car. But on the other hand I don't have to look for parking, and it takes less than half the time to get to work from her place, compared to driving.
Since selling my car, I am saving so much money, it's a little bit silly. I pay DKK 375/month for the two main zones, and that covers 90% of my monthly travel. With my car, I filled the tank twice a month for around DKK 600 each time, not to mention parking fees, insurance, yearly tax, plus repairs and maintenance.
I'd much rather use that money for more traveling and other experiences.
I believe that if you want to motivate people so they would do something, positive motivation ("Let's make someone's life better/easier by doing what we want him to do") is much more effective than negative motivation ("Let's complicate someone's life so he would have no other option than doing what we want him to do"). It's easier to hate/rebel against when someone is punishing me for doing something than hate when someone is rewarding me for doing it differently.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A5DCALY/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
I'm not OK with this.
If you truly believe your way is better, then put it out there and lets see if people adopt it. You don't get to "cheat" by making the other options worse, just to make yours seem better.
Pee on a tree. (I would provide a link, but I made that a private site as it wasn't being developed.)
You need your population to have more money, not less, so that they can afford to pay for improvements in their living environment.
It's not an accident that the higher the standard of living, the lower pollution is.
Citation? The richest countries in the world pollute (CO2e) far more per-capita than than anyone else. Even that's with much of their pollution outsourced to developing nations.
People are so focused on Co2 these days, they've completely forgotten about actual pollution. Forgetting is understandable in developed countries because we've all but eliminated it, so what's there to think about?
But go visit some non-developed countries, or maybe read the news, and you'll suddenly realize what a huge problem actual pollution is.
So Co2e is pollution, it's a harmful substance in currently produced quantities.
You can not define pollution by quantity, that completely erases the meaning of the word.
The single most significant thing an average uninfluential "western" individual can do currently, is not reproduce or at least reproduce less [1] [2]. Possibly then use your abundant available time and resources to inform and educate the public - try become influential, or just take it easy and watch the madness.
Curbing unnecessary air travel doesn't hurt either.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...
[2] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541