"We can't make it illegal to go around poisoning people until we've found new jobs for all the poisoners"?
More restrictions on road and car use shouldn't surprise anyone at this point, it's been coming down the pipe for years. At some point you have to make the status quo painful, because no-one's willing to change anything if they're not feeling the pain yet.
You're literally saying 'we should inflict more pain on the relatively poor'. And it's not just about transport. With ever-rising energy prices, people are literally forced to choose 'between heating and eating'
Meanwhile, the people in charge of solving the problem of climate change are still flying around the world on private jets.
> You're literally saying 'we should inflict more pain on the relatively poor'.
The poorest already don't own or use cars. Getting cars off the road will make buses faster and more reliable, and the poorest will benefit the most from that.
We need fewer cars on the road, so any way you slice it some people have to be pushed out of driving, and any way you slice it the rich will find a way to pay to continue to drive. Either we let them pay directly, and spend that money in public-directed ways that improve transit and help the poor, or we adopt some other system and they'll find more wasteful ways to use money to "solve the problem" that just mean everyone loses out. (e.g. some cities have a rule that each car is only allowed into the city a few days a week depending on its numberplate - so the result is that rich people buy two cars).
> Meanwhile, the people in charge of solving the problem of climate change are still flying around the world on private jets.
And they'll continue to do that until we adopt a carbon tax system so dumb that there's no way around it. But if you try to just "ban private jets" then they'll buy private prop planes, or private trains, or fly around in private full-size airliners...
That's because some states love enacting laws that say things like "You can only have one voting place per county". Which is fine if you have 100,000 people in a county and untenable if you have 1,000,000. Oddly enough that affects one of the parties more than the other.
We do plenty of that stuff. Even the poorest states in the country have regular highway work. If most people shifted to other forms of transit instead of putting such demand on the roads investment will shift accordingly to deal with the wear and tear increasing in this one sector while decreasing in another.
If most people shifted to other forms of transit instead of putting such demand on the roads
I'd say this is an example of putting the cart before the horse. Why would you expect people to shift to other forms of transit before the road network supports these other forms of transit?
Well, they shifted to the car before networks could handle that to be fair. Grade separated highways only appeared after widespread car ownership. We generally build capacity for what exists not what would be nice to have in the future, so if people want to see a world of transit investment maybe they should think about waiting for the bus that shows up twice an hour, which might put pressure to make that come once every 15 minutes, then even sooner, and eventually upgraded to a rail line.
