Yes, this is why traffic is so minimal in the top 10 MSAs in America.
There will be no political will to invest in quality public transit unless there is lots of pain in using comfortable and convenient individual vehicle transit.
Paying $100+ for a trip will make people support bus and train and bicycle infrastructure investments. Keep driving costs down at $0.60 to $1.00 per minute or per mile, and it makes sense to use your own car, which then means it makes sense to support initiatives that are contrary to public transit, such as mandated parking lot minimums and giant roads.
this is already the status quo.
Solving each problem directly and in the simplest way possible results in the fewest unintended consequences.
Problem is congestion, aka too many cars in x location at y time? Make it more expensive.
Problem is some people are too poor? Redistribute wealth via progressive taxation.
Sometimes, that would mean my taxes are going to pay for something which hurts me in the short term, if I want to get to a future where individual cars are not used as much and walking/bicycling/public transit are possible.
So, stop paying for the roads with tax money. Fully internalize the costs with user fees, directing tax spending elsewhere, and the argument about fairness of tax spending goes away. In fact, raise the user fees high enough that the road users are subsidizing other public projects, specifically mass transit, as well as paying the full cost of the roads.
Drive less than average and you're making a profit regardless of where you are on the scale.
The solutions that worked when there were x number of people living in an area, with y number of miles traveled in z number of individual cars simply might not work if you double or triple x, y, and z given the hard boundary conditions of the world such as space, pollutions, and supply of materials and energy.
I love express lanes, they cost so little and everyone stays out of them leading to a great experience for only 5-10 $
Lots of good discussion on this idea here: https://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-traffic/
Flowing from the US to oil-rich nations in form of security assistance to buy policy, or in the form of US military going to enforce policy preferences, as well as:
> A gallon of gasoline largely costs the same in the US as it does in Europe, if you strip away the taxes.
Accepting negative externalities without internalizing them (whether through direct liability for externalized harms or pigovian taxes) is a forced subsidy to the activity creating those externalities by the rest of society.
I live in a city where they decided parking downtown was too cheap because people were parking for too long. The effect was massive drop in business EVERYWHERE downtown. Why would I travel there to pay $25 to park while I shop? I'll just go shop elsewhere, where parking is free, and too bad so sad to the shops that go out of business because policy makers don't understand second order effects.
Now downtown is filled with empty parking and empty stores.