Except the argument you make doesn't include hundreds of billions to trillions in subsidy (direct and indirect) to keep a dependent land-use pattern afloat. This isn't about artificially raising the price of driving, it's about removing the artificial price suppression to reveal auto's true cost. And if done right (including appropriate carbon taxes in our system that increase the cost of electricity that runs our LRTs as well as gasoline emissions in our cars), the true cost of transit would ALSO present itself, making biking and walking viable economic choices as well. I'm not advocating for continuing to subsidize the operating cost of transit - indeed if that is the "low bar" for transportation choice, we're missing 2 whole segments that many people throughout the world use and require much less infrastructure (bike/walk). But I guarantee that if externalities were taken in to account as much as possible, the price of driving would increase substantially more than the price of using transit.The opposite could be said-
Lets increase Transit fares 'til people can't afford them and have to use their cars-
This makes exactly as much sense.
I use transit A LOT but I don't have to pay for it-
If I did, I'd just use my car, it's far, far cheaper, and radically faster.
(there's usually no one dealing drugs in it, nor do I have to hide my little dogs in my backpack!)
I'm just not ready to pressure people into transit- Right or as wrong as it might be, and hearing others talk about it makes me even more uncomfortable.
**I AM willing to pay more taxes so my neighbors can get around on something that makes sense**
**In our current development pattern there are nearly no places that transit makes sense, regardless of if we subsidize it through tax money. The fact that transit needs subsidy today is not a failure of transit's inherent inability to break even (a market failure), more a failure of land-use patterns. If we did the latter correctly but there were still groups of the population that could not afford transit, then we could subsidize their demand (rather than the supply), which would undoubtedly cost less than what we're currently doing. And I personally have no problem with using tax money for that**