They're dramatically over-served. Cars are a luxury. They've been afforded free roads, free parking and free externalities for like a hundred years. Free ride's over.
Living in a poor or lower middle class outer suburb and commuting by car is slower and hundreds of dollars a month more expensive than living in the urban core and taking public transportation. I have no idea what on Earth you are talking about. Do you think everyone lives in a low density suburban sprawl where public transportation is completely impractical?
> Living in a poor or lower middle class outer suburb and commuting by car is slower and hundreds of dollars a month more expensive than living in the urban core and taking public transportation.
Totally. Because it's wildly inefficient for everyone to own an average 0.8 $35,000 blocks of metal that are in motion an average of 1.02 hours per day (idle almost 96% of the time). That requires roads, lights, signs, police, fire trucks, ambulances, gas stations/charging ports, insurance, parking, registration and tracking, maintenance, etc. That's before we get to externalities.
Yes it's hundreds of dollars more expensive to have a car, but it should be thousands. It's incredibly subsidized. Car owners have been massively over-served, and it's time they directly paid the actual cost of their choices.
Car ownership should be a luxury, not a requirement to exist. Especially in lower-middle-class suburbs. All our investments into roads and highways should be redirected towards avoiding it. All parking should be for-pay. Road costs should be born by road users. And yeah, people who make inefficient choices about their transportation should be penalized by usage charges.
What makes you think road users have been underserved relative to the literally zero investment in transit made in the US since Eisenhower?
Why shouldn't the cost of a dramatically less efficient transportation choice be much higher than a much more efficient transportation choice?
