IMHO, we should things the way they are, and spread the true costs of driving across all of society. The rich should pay higher taxes so that they pay more than the true cost of their car usage, to subsidize the driving of the less well off.
Alternate ways of saying the same thing include "make driving optional" or "driving should be considered a luxury."
I.e. we should structure our cities and towns so that most people are able to conveniently do most of their activities without driving.
Similarly, only the rich should fly private? Or should we go and subsidize that for the masses, too? Some things are simply expensive and don't scale if you want to allow everyone to do it -- "if everyone would live like us we would need X earths" comes to mind.
So I'm not sure what you're proposing. Should there be a maximum personal vehicle kilometers allocation rather than just charging what it costs to clean up the pollution again? Not saying I'm for or against that, just wondering what you think the alternative could even be.
https://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/big-cities-are-pas...
where the people saying "Big Cities are past their prime" were extremely down on public transportation. It's possible they are correct that we could really never have good public transportation in the USA because our cities aren't designed around it. But, I did want to reach through the podcast and shake them, "Go visit the largest city on the plant, Tokyo!" and see if you can't imagine public transit working for a city of 34 million people.
Of course it's possible the reality is it just can't happen in the USA. See the fiasco of SF's Central Line. I'd argue the best place to try is Los Angeles. It used to have the best in the public transit in the world in say 1920-1950 but it was all torn down. In any case, it looks like it has maybe enough people that a truly good public transit with nice stations as destinations and express lines etc would work but you'd have to magically make about 80 lines appear. A few lines at a time will never get to the MVP of actually making the system useful for the average person that wants to get from A to B because it would require 80 lines to get from every A to every B.
Also, people seem to forget that Japan's system is privatized and the incentives seem to align. The train companies create/fund/own buildings at and around their stations so they have every incentive to make people want to ride the trains as use their stations and all the buildings and businesses around them. Some of them even build housing.
And, if they don't like the big city version then they can go to Amsterdam (pop 800k), Antwerp (500k), Barcelona (1600k), Copenhagen (600k), Helsinki (630k), Koln (1000k), etc... that all have pretty great public transportation.