"Many" is doing a lot of work in your claim.
I recently moved to Houston where it feels like every road is a six lane stroad. If transportation were reduced to mass transit, bike lanes, and commercial transit like deliveries, how many of those roads would we need?
> In addition those 6-lane highways are all toll roads
6-lane means total lanes, so 3-4 in each direction like Richmond Ave or Westheimer Rd in Houston which you have to take just to get to the gym or grocery store.
But I think you need to go to Houston on Google Maps and look at all of the freeways that are 5-6 lanes in each direction bursting out like tentacles from the center in all directions. It seems like you're not aware that these exist?
- 1 or 2 car lanes (each way)
- a tram line (one each way on each side of the street, or in the middle)
- a separated, 2 way bike lane on either side of the street
- a separated (from the bike lane) sidewalk
- a canal
As you can imagine, this takes up a lot of space. Despite this, things feel much more walkable. The reason? No enormous parking lots around every store. Parking is generally almost entirely done at P+R parking lots outside of town, then taking public transit in.
You can walk from your home to a cafe or corner shop for fresh produce almost everywhere I lived in Mexico.
Not until I moved back to the US did I remember how us sad Americans (or at least Texans) have to pile into a car just to drive to a cafe, though inside the city/suburbs this is also caused by zoning laws.
Granted, I'm just ranting. But I forgot how bad it was. Fortunately, some of this is very slowly changing. Even Houston is laying down more bike paths: https://houstonbikeplan.org/houston-bike-plan-map/
Where I live, we don't really have those, but...
> lost productivity from sitting in traffic
That part of the cost equation is flipped upside down here (where I live) if you start looking at any of the currently-available alternatives. Public transit is a nightmare to navigate. What would be a 12-minute drive from my house to the work shop ends up taking a bit over an hour, assuming the buses all arrive on time and you don't end up missing a connection. And there won't be much productivity happening on that trip, the city uses the busses to move high school students around right around the same time I'd be going to and from work. In the summer it would quicker to bike for sure.
Ultimately, though, I've found the best way of all to cut down on the commute: just work from home! Can't do it every day when we're in the middle of a hardware build, but lots of days it works out just fine.
There were roads before cars and trucks:
> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as “road hogs” or “speed demons” and cars as “juggernauts” or “death cars.” He considers the perspectives of all users—pedestrians, police (who had to become “traffic cops”), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for “justice.” Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of “efficiency.” Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking “freedom”—a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.
* https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic
Various goods managed to be delivered even before cars/trucks.
And it would be possible to restrict/prioritize use towards commercial vehicles.
That'd already massively reduce the amount of driving required, as you suddenly no longer need to drive a few miles for your groceries. And because you don't arrive by car the grocery store doesn't need a huge parking lot either.
Nobody is proposing getting rid of all roads, they clearly have value. People are just proposing making it possible to live without requiring a car for something as basic as grocery shopping. As long as cities are built from a car-centric perspective first, they will require a car to live in.
If I understand it correctly, it means that damage to roads is completely dominated by trucks, as long as you have more than 10,000 cars per truck. Near my home I would estimate it at around 100 cars for every truck.
This means that cars are completely negligible, and that supporting road construction and repair by taxes (ideally, direct taxes on the truck users, which is then rolled on to consumers through higher prices) is correct.