> [WS:] I cannot help but notice that the pricing of
> public transit in this country is such as not to
> "dethrone" the car.
Much truth in this. There's been a blinkered, monomaniacal commitment to car-based transport for what, 75 years and more? Only now are we starting to see any indication at all that Management is starting to reconsider, and it's very early days yet. Internalizing car cost is at best only half the picture; better and cheaper transit is the indispensable other half. Since social investment is much resented by the elites, who would rather keep the money for themselves, it's also very much the harder part. Still, it does happen. We in NYC now have rail links to two of our airports, a recent development.
Congestion charges have recently been imposed in London, Stockholm, and several other places I forget. You could, I suppose, regard this as yet another fiendish Capitalist plot to rob The Workers with a regressive tax. One slight problem with this picture is that driving, in places like London's and Stockholm's and New York's CBD's, is not really a prole activity. People driving into these areas tend to be comparatively well-off.
The elites, or at least the folks who manage the world on their behalf, are capable of exercising instrumental rationality. My observation of this congestion-charge process, for what it's worth, suggests that the awareness is becoming more general in elite circles that car-choked city centers are, well, bad for business. Factually, they're right, I think, and since I believe that car-choked cities are bad for any number of other reasons too, I think this is a step in the right direction. Like the rail links to the airports, even though they too are fruit of the poisoned tree of Capitalism.
> It seems that the owners of this country are very
> careful not to dethrone the car and they enjoy full
> support of right wing populists and useful idiots on
> the Left.
With his customary suavity and grace, WS is making the familiar argument that measure X is no good because it fails to usher in the Millennium. I've been hearing this a lot lately about congestion pricing from NY whale-savers who just happen to drive a lot.