We provide an alternative that is better than cars
I live in a country where the public transport is excellent (Switzerland). The US sounds like a nightmare to me.
When you drive, you can't step into the dining car and grab some lunch and a beer while you catch up on podcasts as the scenery goes passing by, like you can in a long distance train.
When you're stuck with a car you can't make day walking trips from village to village, unless you plan to make a circle to get back to your car. Doing something like the Pilgrims’ Way, a 10 day pilgrimage walk from Winchester to Canterbury, is right out.
Gud is from Switzerland, where there is no need to pick someone up from the airport because all of the airports have excellent transit connections.
I guess you won't visit a random restaurant or historical site in Zermatt, as that's one of the car-free places in Switzerland, and the train you'll take likely won't have the temperature set at the warmth you require.
When you're in a place built for cars, you expect stores to be far away, so need to buy in bulk since you only want to shop for a week. When you are on a place built for walking, stores are also in walking distance, and you can easily go every day or two. But even if you don't want that, grocery stores can deliver - friends of mine in the UK got a bulk Tesco delivery every week.
For that matter, the last few times we got furniture we paid someone to move it for us - I've never had a car big enough to move more than a couple of chairs or some flat pack box from IKEA.
The US has "soccer moms" because their younger teens essentially require a chauffeur to do any after-school activity. For some that idea of being chained to the kids' free time activities is great, to others it's a nightmare. In places with good mass transit, kids have more freedom to travel on their own and be independent.
I dunno. It seems like the Europeans I know have done a lot of things. It helps they have 4-6 weeks of vacation time. And Portugal to Norway is quite a long way.
And, cars take time. They need to be maintained, you need figure out insurance, if there's something wrong you need to get it fixed, and have backup transportation. You've got to deal with traffic jams, you've got to figure who is the DD for the night if you go out drinking with friends, if you get kids you might have to buy a new car - it's an endless list things.
Almost everywhere has buses. What does it take to make them better? How do we know that will work? How much does it cost and how do we make it happen?
We need to rebuild our cities. Eliminating cars and adding sidewalks isn't enough; without density, you have nowhere to walk to, and transit doesn't scale.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/04/29/mexico-city-bus-rapid-t...
they also tax gas heavily, which we don't do (and probably should)
Put the United States in a dryer on high.
"On average, as of April 2019, state and local taxes and fees add 34.24 cents to gasoline and 35.89 cents to diesel, for a total US volume-weighted average fuel tax of 52.64 cents per gallon for gas and 60.29 cents per gallon for diesel" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
In 2019 gasoline wholesale price was around $1.80 - https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=E...
0.5264 /1.8 = 30%
New York Harbor Conventional Gasoline Regular Spot Price FOB is US$2.61 per gallon today - https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=gasoline .
.5264 /2.61 = 20%
Note that the wholesale price does not include the cost to deliver to the gas station or nor storage and dispensing costs at the station, so the percentage at point of sale will be slower than these numbers.
Cigarettes are not a universal good. There is a federal excise tax on cigarettes of $1.01 per pack and state taxes from $0.17/pack in Missouri to $5.35/pack in New York, plus possible city taxes. "As of 2011, Phillip Morris lists total government revenue, including federal, state, local, and sales taxes, as 55% of the estimated retail price of a pack of cigarettes in the United States" and "[WHO] estimates that taxes make up 42.5% of the cost of a pack of cigarettes in the U.S." Numbers and quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_taxes_in_the_United_....
That is nearly 100% of the base cost.
Some cities have an extra tax on sugary drinks. Also not a universal good. "Kaplan and his colleagues found that, on average, prices for sugar-sweetened drinks went up by 33.1%". https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/01/06/1223243...
Note that the additional 33% is on top of sales tax, meaning the total tax on sugary drinks was more than 33%.
So both cigarettes and sugary drinks (in some areas) have a higher tax rate than gasoline.
Bear in mind that some of the fuel tax is used defray the high cost of car infrastructure; "defray" because most of the infrastructure cost is paid by sources other than fuel taxes.