Cars are really fucking dumb and car fees should be put through the fucking roof

Spoken like a true city person, who has also bought the "muh roads" strawman hook line and sinker.

Perhaps I should have said "cars in cities" perhaps, and then a bunch of caveats like "unless you need to carry heavy objects along roads frequently". I didn't, because I was writing a paragraph and not a book.

Cars are useful in the country. Cars are not useful for traversing the city without massive government subsidy.

If you visit the country weekly, then by all means buy a car. If you go once a year or less, then car ownership is a dumb waste of $5k/year. And most city-dwellers do not visit the country weekly.

Cars are not useful because of government spending. Roads would be a valuable investment without any government involvement at all.

Roads have limited capacity, and when that capacity runs out people can either A) expand the capacity of the road (with more lanes), or B) start investing in buses/trains.

The more fiscally responsible option is almost always B.

So, to clarify: I'm not advocating abolishing roads. I'm advocating abolishing fucking giant roads. Keep them small to the point where only people who would rationally derive utility from them are accommodated. Everyone who only drives their SUV to their office and back can go stop wasting taxpayer money and valuable real-estate.

Outside of dense urban centers mass transit on a scale capable of replacing individual vehicles is insanely inefficient.

Wait, are you talking about suburbs, or rural areas?

If you're talking about car-centric suburbs, well were fucked either way, because they're fundamentally inefficient no matter how you square it. They're horrifically unwalkable (the T-junctions trade away distance-efficiency for car-safety) and basically require a car to get anywhere (and a car is typically a 2-ton vehicle carrying a single 1/10th-ton passenger, horrifically inefficient), and they're abysmally wasteful with land while simultaneously being horrifically inflexible so you can't adapt them into something that is efficient.

If you're talking about rural areas then yeah, have a network of single-lane roads, sure.

But frankly, if you find yourself advocating building a multi-storey parking block - an apartment for cars - then it's time to seriously rethink the transport network.