Two things there: I'm not sure that it is tautological. There's a definite "psychology" of lobbying for more car resources and the psychological fury of being

Two things there: I'm not sure that it is tautological. There's a definite "psychology" of lobbying for more car resources and the psychological fury of being "caught behind a tram" or seeing the "wasted space" or a "tram going by ahead of you", but trap the same person in a car at a standstill in traffic with less throughput and the fury disappears and a kind of quiet resentment yet passive acceptance replaces it. Put a motorist behind a tram and it becomes the object of their hatred. Put them in gridlock and the car in front becomes "just a drop in the overall frustrating flow, with the proportional amount of blame". Secondly, back to the "wasted space observation" phenomenon. There's this paradox of space wastage observations in the higher density/high utilisation part of town made by people from low density/low utilisation parts of town. Higher density areas provide and support services that are intrinsically unattainable in low density areas, so it's not immediately apparent that someone outside the high density area is worse off, because they now have a greater diversity of opportunity/facilities accessible even if they live outside the high density area. You can visit and access those services even if you don't live there. Personally, i'd rather live in a Melbourne suburb without a tram than a Sydney one, because the Sydney CBD is comparatively dead/pedestrian hostile. The obvious example is the central business district or downtown. While it's a popular polemical tactic to pit the car drivers against the dense pedestrian core, it's a very "brave" position to argue that denser well-connected areas provide no benefit to those who live outside them. The counter example is the wasted space, neighborhood destruction and bizarrely barren wastelands of some American cities: strip malls, multi lane highways, car parks, etc, and the realisation that they can neither sustain thriving local communities or neighborhoods, but culturally can only be populated with mega-stores and generic chains/stores accessible by mass cars and mass culture.