It’s not that you can’t achieve the goal, it’s that you can’t force people into it by making their daily lives worse. Or at least that seems like that would be the least effective political strategy.

Less car dependency will make lives better, not worse.

OP suggested intentionally making commutes unbearable as a means of forcing people into cities to achieve this. That’s the wrong order of operations and would backfire politically imo.

Personally I work remote, so I would probably just go to the city less if it were made more inconvenient to do so. This has already happened to an extent. No free parking? I’m not going unless I have to. Public transit as it exists isn’t a good alternative either. It’s slow and I don’t want to be harassed by addicts at the bus stop.

Any plan that involves coercion isn’t something I’m interested in.

This is exactly it. You go with solutions that doesn't anger the car political class, like just building more rail vs. destroying car infra. You drag you're feet on maintaining the car infra. Traffic gets really bad, but man, the train is so much more convenient now, safe, clean and 3x faster than driving, your an idiot for driving man. You start running tearjerker ads about how an older person couldn't drive anymore, but now with a real transit system, they can still get around. Then people don't really drive that much and the car infra starts getting replaced by buildings because that makes more money, etc, etc.

There are places that have torn down highways and deliberately made a hundred million people’s lives so difficult they are compelled to move? In the name of transportation efficiency?

Which such places, could you be specific about that?

My understanding is the inverse has happened. Where there are now highways through the middle of cities west of the Mississippi, there used to be homes there.

I'm skeptical that US road engineers did anything other than add roads and lanes to improve vehicle throughput. Examples to the contrary would be very interesting.

Yeah, I’m skeptical of that claim as well. And if someone tried it on me I’d tell them and their city to go fuck themselves, not move there. I can’t be the only one with that attitude.

They are not compelled to move, they are compelled to vote out the politicians who enacted such things and vote in politicians that fix it in their eyes. Why do you never see debates about highway project costs, but in the USA there are a billion of them about transit project costs.