this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
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Today I Learned
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Easy problem to solve.
Increase the cost of gas to $100 per liter for consumers (exceptions for food delivery, etc) and use the surplus income to build better busses.
Boom. Everyone has excellent public transportation. And everyone uses it.
Your assumption that busses exist so they can be improved is quite telling. Huge swaths of the population, even living in million inhabitants+ cities, simply are not served by any form of mass transit.
The reason public transit works so well in Germany (where I did live for a bit) and Holland (visited and read about) is not because taking a car is more expensive. It's because mass transit works well, it's there when you need it, gets you to your destination in reasonable time and comfort, and is easy to use.
The very urban fabric in the USA is car oriented. Every little bodega has to have a dozen parking spaces built by law. Supermarkets have 3 to 4 times their store area wasted in parking lots. Everything is far apart because of this, so walking is impractical. With everyone driving to places, you need wide, fast roads, which makes biking places very unsafe. Every once in a while I see a white painted bike attached to a memorial in a light post, commemorating a life lost. And I live in the suburbs.
It's not an insurmountable problem, the Netherlands did that in the 70s. But any solution that proposes a simple fix is doomed to failure. This has to be a concerted, intense effort to work.
My approach would be to jack up vehicle registration fees. Simply doubling the vehicle registration cost every year over about 5 years would make individual car ownership expensive enough that people will really try to avoid it.
By the fifth year you're looking at about $5k per year just to legally own and operate a car on public roads, which is workable (most people pay more than that per year for their car loans) but it's more than enough to make any family think twice about owning more than one car, and more than enough to make not owning a car and just renting/taking public transit a super attractive option. Plus it's more than the cost of a mid-range e-bike so trading your car for an ebike becomes extremely cost effective with a break-even point measured in just months
5 years is also enough time to get roads reconfigured for the new traffic flow of mostly ebikes, get more buses in the roads and start planning/building out new train routes. There's an incredible rail network still in the US and just putting out more passenger services on the existing tracks that are presently freight-exclusive would make a massive difference
Two stroke engines in lawn care motors produce worse pollution than cars.
We need to increase the cost of gas. It's not just cars.