my gf in Tokyo years ago was a country folk singer. played slide on a metal resonator guitar. for much of my time there my evenings were spent at folks and roots music bars, listening to talented live musicians. in States we live in abject poverty, culturally.
“There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.”
― Ben Horowitz
This is precisely the reasoning I bring up. In essence traffic congestion is an externality not unlike pollution. What society now pays in the form of a financial levy it formerly paid in the form of a wasted time. We've made explicit a cost that was already there, and by doing so the system can respond to it and behave more intelligently.
> What society now pays in the form of a financial levy it formerly paid in the form of a wasted time.
Where it gets to be a problem is when instead of spending 40 minutes to get somewhere because of time stuck in traffic many people become priced out of driving and now have to spend 1.5 hours on public transportation to make the same trip. The cost of wasted time in this specific case might not be as extreme, but as more public roads are paywalled off around the country I expect we'll see more people forced to use inadequate public transportation suffer.
your reasoning falls apart because mass transit options are inherently faster due to the geometric-space efficiencies gained by their form factors. You just need to induce enough people to participate in it to cross a tipping point where it becomes financially viable to run regular service, e.g., in NYC taking a train is often the fastest.
