It all comes down to money in the end. Because of the cheap prices of gasoline and parking, there is usually no financial incentive to take public transit. Even

It all comes down to money in the end. Because of the cheap prices of gasoline and parking, there is usually no financial incentive to take public transit. Even in NYC, which probably has the cheapest, widest coverage of transit, you still have to pay about $3 each way. But you can drive and park for less than that for most commute distances. (Not counting car maintenance, insurance, and other "fixed costs" of driving of course.) Cycling is a good exception to this, but there is almost no culture supporting the use of bikes (or scooters etc.) and very little planned infrastructure, which leads to extreme hostility from drivers and ultimately to injury and death (just about 30 cyclists this year alone in NYC). City governments are at fault and should be brought to account for this. However, most media attention uses language that implicitly (or sometimes even explicitly) blames the actions of pedestrians and cyclists when they are victims of car violence, rather than the drivers or the design of the city. Even when drivers are themselves blamed, it is assumed that tragic events are only caused by rare incidents involving "bad" drivers, rather than a pervasive culture and systemic organisation that allows for these tragic events to continue unhindered. There needs to be a strong social backlash against almost any form of personal use of heavy machinery equipped with combustion engines, that is not absolutely necessary, within regions where there are many unprotected people on foot/bike/etc. And this must be directed at governments and other institutions that have the power to but are currently unwilling to create such necessary change. Blaming individuals will not get us there and will only lead to further entrenched "culture war". This is the strategy that was used in the Netherlands which, prior to the 80s, had a very similar commuting landscape to the US but now has massive bicycle and public transit use.