What jumped to my attention from your comment is that tolls seem to bother you more than public transportation not being a suitable option.
I live in Madrid, which has a metropolitan population of 6.5 million (compared to Sydney's 5.2m). I can get pretty much everywhere from anywhere in about 1 hour, combining metro and buses.
So when I want to visit a friend, I just go out the door, and walk to the metro station. If I had to drive a car just to do that I would feel I have less freedom of movement than I have now.
Exactly. I'm still waiting for a day I see a full-throated defense of a car-centric system that frankly doest rely on myopia about the second-order effects of the system. Sure, given that you're in a city designed around owning cars, owning a car has advantages: that's almost tautological. But policy needs to think at the societal level, which includes all the effects that you take for granted as part of the background. Without the criminal waste of valuable urban space that cars entail, the odds that GP would be taking a 45 minute trip would be far lower.
The ubiquity of this kind of myopia makes me worry about transit policy, and I've seen little evidence that voters are capable of or willing to engage in second-order thinking, especially when their incentives are involved. Though I suppose it's not like our transit policy could get much worse....
They definitely won't engage in that level of abstract thinking, given so many of them have cars that are already too expensive for their take-home. The number of 72 month terms on fancy cars, unbelievable to me.
I live in Madrid, which has a metropolitan population of 6.5 million (compared to Sydney's 5.2m). I can get pretty much everywhere from anywhere in about 1 hour, combining metro and buses.
So when I want to visit a friend, I just go out the door, and walk to the metro station. If I had to drive a car just to do that I would feel I have less freedom of movement than I have now.