Exactly. I'm still waiting for a day I see a full-throated defense of a car-centric system that frankly doest rely on myopia about the second-order effects of the system. Sure, given that you're in a city designed around owning cars, owning a car has advantages: that's almost tautological. But policy needs to think at the societal level, which includes all the effects that you take for granted as part of the background. Without the criminal waste of valuable urban space that cars entail, the odds that GP would be taking a 45 minute trip would be far lower.

The ubiquity of this kind of myopia makes me worry about transit policy, and I've seen little evidence that voters are capable of or willing to engage in second-order thinking, especially when their incentives are involved. Though I suppose it's not like our transit policy could get much worse....