As a human living on earth, I don't actually much care what the 97% or 90% actually think about their commutes. Using transit instead of single-occupant cars is a huge improvement from an environmental and economic standpoint.
The thing to remember whenever “better than the alternative” comes up is that transit is good where cars are bad and cars are good everywhere else. Transit is never going to beat out cars in environments where traffic is light, density is low, and parking is cheap. But traffic isn’t light and parking isn’t cheap where density is high.
This is about deciding which kind of city you want and building the transportation options that fit that environment. Cities built for cars are very different from cities built for density and walkability. You can’t compare the two modes devoid of that context.
Raising the price of gas negatively affects the working poor more than helps the environment. That subset of society may not live in an area accessible by transit, or their employment requires them to be in a different location than is feasible to travel to by transit.
> Raising the price of gas negatively affects the working poor more than helps the environment
In the short run. In the long run, the proceeds could be used to encourage the working poor to move to cities where they don't need a car. Given how financially terrible car ownership is for America's poor--between traffic tickets, civil forfeiture, police violence, predatory lending and collection practices, insurance practices, et cetera--I think it would be a net boon.
And the way to do that without discharging a loaded 12ga into the foot of the economy and everyone's quality of life is to make public transit better and more plentiful, not artificially raise the cost of private transit (which raises the cost of everything that depends on it). While the HN crowd had the economic stability to absorb an increased cost of private transit a huge chunk of the population would be negatively impacted in a way large enough to be worth avoiding. Carrots > sticks.
That doesn’t address the point about people driving to the transit station. If someone is willing to tolerate driving their car one hour, adding a transit leg will just allow them to drive one hour while living slightly further from their office, which in isolation doesn’t help the environment.
