In a real city, you can usually walk or at the very least, cycle to your grocery store. Gotta love that goalpost shifting. Have you considered that there are p

In a real city, you can usually walk or at the very least, cycle to your grocery store. Gotta love that goalpost shifting. Have you considered that there are plenty of cities here in the US (real or not, by your standards) where that's not true? We are talking about cities like Philly, and people that live in cities like Philly, we are not talking about some exurb that uses subsidized parking in major cities to facilitate their commute. The problem is that without the commuters coming in, the urban core dies. This is exactly what happened in Detroit. Now, it's possible that if you already have an excellent transit system and a vibrant urban core (like New York, for example), you can impose congestion charges and get away with it, because the core of the city is attractive enough for people to continue to want to go there and the public transit system is robust enough to carry them. But that's not the case in Philadelphia. For older "rust belt" cities, which are already having issues with people moving away to sunnier, warmer southern cities with lower taxes and bigger roads, making the core of the city even more inaccessible isn't a winning strategy.