> It is not guaranteed that moving several
> tons of metal through rush hour stop and go every day just to move one
> person means a high quality of life -- for that person or the ones around
> that person.
while i don't have a car myself yet i certainly see it as a very desirable
way of getting arround even compared to good public transport.

if travelling by car and suddenly you wan't to take say a couple of PCs and
monitors with you or maybe a couple of small but heavy rackmount servers
to/from a colocation facility its no issue, doing it by public transport
would be a major pita.

the same goes for shopping, you can bring far more in one car trip where you
use a supermarket trolly to load the car (or if walking round a shopping
centre going back to the car to drop stuff off when you have as much as you
can carry before resuming shopping) and park it near the house to unload
than you can if you have to carry it all with you in one go (pretty much a
requirement for taking stuff with you on public transport)

also unless you live work and do everything you wan't to do really near the
city centre public transport often puts severe restrictions on when you can
travel, for example here (somewhere in the uk i won't say exactly where) we
now have a bus service every 15 minuites monday to saturday daytime which is
just fine. However if you wan't to travel on sundays or public holidays or
in the evenings then its down to an hourly service which means any trip
needs carefull planning. Connection issues make using infrequent
evening/sunday/public holiday services even worse if you aren't simply
travvelling in and out of the center of town.

having said that taking cars into a city centre in rush hour is certainly
something that should be discouraged to improve everyones quality of life.

how to discourage antisocial car use (rather than disouraging car ownership
but encouraging those who decide to own a car to use them as much as
possible which is what current systems seem to do):
1: charge all road taxes based on distance or fuel use not as a fixed cost.
2: force insurance companies to do the same.
3: charge extra for using busy roads at busy times (doing it on a per road
basis is impractical but a zone based system like londons is reasonable)
4: provide good schemes for parking outside the city centre and catching
public transport in, ideally make theese as faster(in other words
preferablly trains of some form and if you must use busses make sure they
have priority in the road network) and cheaper than parking in the centre.

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