> road maintenance is highly unprofitable I think there could be success in making an argument like this, and pitching consumption taxes could help make that m

> road maintenance is highly unprofitable I think there could be success in making an argument like this, and pitching consumption taxes could help make that math more apparent without requiring any rhetoric. > selling us car culture I think this is a dead end, though. That's why I mentioned realpolitik - something like 92% of Americans have access to a car. A big chunk of these people like car culture, plenty don't particularly care but have built their lives around the status quo, and the ones who don't but participate anyways do so because they're priced out of communities that are walkable/have good transit. You need ways to gradually make transit better and make people less dependent on cars. I'm an example; work from home allowed me to get rid of our family's second car five years ago. You could argue that free transit can help with that. I don't; I'd rather see transit extract value from those who are able to pay and be more reliant on operating income, and I don't think "it's too expensive" is the primary reason why most people don't switch to transit. But regardless of what I think, if even 6 out of 10 of that 92% think it's unfair, then it's a political non-starter.