> Either people need to drive or they don't. People don't drive just for the fun of it anymore.

This isn't true. Some people live in places where it's possible to reduce their driving quite a lot, but when they decide to do that, it isn't as easy as simply choosing not to drive. Once they're motivated, they start to figure out opportunities to drive less. They start to figure out which other forms of transit are practical in their area, and they figure them out one by one. They start to figure out how they can adjust their habits to reduce driving. (Fewer, larger trips to the grocery store, for example.)

There are a lot of degrees of "not driving." You might bike to work in perfect weather at one level of motivation, and bike to work in the rain at a different level of motivation. One level of motivation might prompt you to make fewer, larger trips to the grocery store; at another level of motivation, when you run out of milk unexpectedly, you might walk five blocks to a corner store of driving ten minutes to the supermarket.

The only perspective from which it seems like a clean either/or is for people who haven't yet found a reason to try. People living in the same neighborhood with the same economic means can and do drive drastically different amounts depending on how motivated they are.

There are no practical means of transit in LA. Sure, there are light rail here and there but it doesn’t get you most places you want to go.

Charging tolls does not fix anything. All that does is enable those with money to have a slightly less stressful commute and add an empty lane to an otherwise crowded highway.

At some point there will be an incentive to move closer to where you drive to the most often. For a lot of people this would be their job.

Unfortunate that the sprawl is so heavily subsidized. In a world where it wasn't, people would make different choices about where to live and work.

It’s not so simple. Many couples don’t work in the same place. You could have the wife working in city A. And the husband working in city B 30 miles away. Moving to where they work only works for one and not the other. In other cases they have kids and the school districts in large cities are absolute shit. In that case you move for the school district so that your kids can have better chances in the same rat race you are in.

Which is why I included the second part of my statement, which you did not quote: we would need to use the proceeds to dramatically increase the quality and quantity of alternatives to driving so that people had a realistic choice.

I totally agree with you that people are driving mostly because they have to, not for fun. However, retrofitting car-oriented development to be viable for non-car users is exceptionally difficult.

I can’t imagine any way of accomplishing that, unless we begin by acknowledging that cars won’t scale up any farther and that we have to redirect our efforts into things that will.

Public transit has to happen first.

If you introduce congestion charges without also providing a functional public transit alternative you'll be voted out of office. Plain and simple.

Congestion charges worked in London, for example, because public transit is amazing there and people could stop driving without decreasing their quality of life. Yet it was still a source of much controversy in London at the time. What are people supposed to do in LA -- walk everywhere?

> we would need to use the proceeds to dramatically increase the quality and quantity of alternatives to driving so that people had a realistic choice.

I agree, but public transit projects take years to complete, so in the interim you'd have very expensive driving and worse congestion than before (due to construction), which sounds like hell on earth. Would it be feasible to invest the costs up front and collect the payout later?

Sevilla, Spain is the poster-child of rapidly building out a bike network[0], and with the political will, that could be replicated elsewhere (especially somewhere flat and sunny like LA). Another easy way to improve transit is paint dedicated bus lanes for BRT lines. Not as sexy as dropping a few mil on light rail, but quick, cheap, and rapidly scalable.

[0]: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/05/07/six-secrets-from-the-...

> which you did not quote

I did not quote, but I did address "Make the alternatives better than driving."

You have things completely backwards, first you want to make everyone miserable, then hopefully they'll fix things.

> retrofitting car-oriented development to be viable for non-car users is exceptionally difficult.

It's actually not about retrofitting, it's because cars are just that good. Nothing else comes close.

> unless we begin by acknowledging that cars won’t scale up any farther

They'll scale just fine if we space out our cities a bit more.

It's actually pretty self balancing, when we run out of road space, people spread out a bit more. So there's no scaling issues, there's plenty of space in the world.

I mean if your goal is to pack people in like livestock then it doesn't scale, but that's not something I want.

> and that we have to redirect our efforts into things that will.

Such as? So far nothing exists. And I'm not just saying that. I tried it. I exclusively used public transportation for 1.5 months, in a city that is world renounced for probably the best public transportation of anywhere. (There was literally nowhere you couldn't go with public transportation.)

It was horrible. I feel really bad for anyone who has to use public transportation.

That's the reality.

If you want change, change that first. You won't need to tax cars off the road, they'll leave on their own.