* Higher fuel consumption = some categories could be exempt, for example vans used by ONGs, firms and independent contractors.

* * Bigger cars = smaller cars are easier to park, take less space in traffic and make it overall more fluid, etc. I think exemptions could be made here for the categories I mentioned previously and for families with children, for example.

Plus, taxing per gallon is exactly proportional to the burden on society.

An extra 50 cents per gallon is quite a bit, but it doesn't seem to discourage this behavior. 40% on the price of the car instead... could make a lot more people think twice about the purchase.

For shorter distances, great bicycling infrastructure helps a lot. Buses are nice but cycling is often as fast, with the benefit of being completely door to door and leaving exactly when you want to. But this benefit only works if people feel completely safe on the road, which means mostly seperate cycle paths, and removing cars from the busy city centers. Not having cars there makes shopping more attractive, because it's now easier to walk from store to the store across the road.

That same infrastructure then also helps make trains more attractive, because you can set up cheap bike hire at stations. This then means your journey can be bike-train-bike door to door, rather than walk-bus-train-bus-walk (or worse).

It's a complicated connected mesh of things.

If you're courageous, you could live in downtown Dallas without a car (can move around a bit with DART). Making it harder to own a car (combined with more "dense-city" developments) doesn't seem like the worst idea. Mainly because we could recover the huuuge parking lots.

And when you want to go to Austin for the weekend you can rent a car.

In any case, even if the entire state is still very much "car necessary", you can still try to incentivise pockets of the state to be less so.

I've commuted by bike and public transportation for a number of years and I'd never want to ban vehicle ownership. A more workable solution would be to make driving tests less of a joke or to make dense areas of city centers car free zones. American cities are just too large and often times people drive without a destination in mind, like my Sunday drives down the California Public Highway along the beach.

Let's focus on the selfish car guy, that's the big picture all right in “saving” the world.

The "selfish car guy" is why the American lifestyle consumes twice as much as the Japanese lifestyle. Everything gets built around it.

And of course there's the fact that the American lifestyle gets exported to other places as well.