"This is an effective subsidy for "sprawl" and is a huge driver of why the US built environment looks the way it does." To be fair, the subsidies are not mostl

"This is an effective subsidy for "sprawl" and is a huge driver of why the US built environment looks the way it does." To be fair, the subsidies are not mostly in highway building. Suburban feeder style streets (4-8 lanes with lights, turn lanes) get bigger subsidies and drive more sprawl. But even those are a smallish factor. The big subsidy is free and cheap parking. Most American cities require that businesses and new homes provide enough parking for everyone who ever wants to come to park free. That's a subsidy equivalent to about $10-30k per car per year, depending on your local real estate costs. The outright majority of space in real estate development in the USA is devoted to satisfying this centralized Soviet style command-and-control mandate. Countries with the most free market real estate development in the free world, like Japan, still build freeways. In fact, Japan has a silly amount of freeways because you don't even need or want a car usually. Those countries are different because they require a lot less parking. So the induced demand and highway subsidy question is not the most central to the car dependence and sprawl question. Parking mandates are much more important to the way life is actually lived in America.