It's not just the cars but all the infrastructure required to support them -- the roads, the highways, the parking lots, traffic enforcement, insurance, etc..
Forget automobiles. We ought to be turning our cities into attractive affordable places where car ownership is unnecessary.
I've been thinking about how we might break our automobile addiction.
Maybe we could offer a free house in the city to every high school graduate. If they stay there for five years, full time, don't buy a car, then the house is theirs, they own it. We could offer the same deal to senior citizens. We could put them to work rebuilding our cities.
I'm not talking about ugly tower blocks, but something entirely traditional in human history, more like small apartments in two or three story houses on narrow mixed-use streets.
The first home my wife and I bought was $8,000, which was maybe $20,000 in today's money. It was in a "rust belt" city where you could buy a house for a dollar if you could prove you had the resources to make it habitable. We had a baby on the way so we wanted something move-in ready, which is why we passed on the one dollar homes. We had the skills and the resources to refurbish a one dollar house, and we'd both lived as renters in worse neighborhoods, we just didn't want to do it with a newborn baby. My grandma paid part of that.
Every young person should have similar opportunities.
People complain about "free stuff" but the children of upper middle class and wealthy people get all sorts of help from their families. Too many of them later claim they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.
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