Via Atrios, this article has some good ideas on how to keep the costs of owning and driving automobiles roughly the same while making them more obvious to people. The idea is that if people were made to think of the various costs of owning a car - maintenance, insurance, parking - they would want to drive less.
He has some good ideas. Unfortunately, Perkins doesn't deal with the largest cost associated with our car culture, which is the money taxpayers have spent and continue to spend on the type of infrastructure that not only allows a car culture, but prioritizes it above any other form of transportation. It's not just interstate highways, but the design of neighborhoods and shopping centers, where we put parks and playing fields, the lack of any room on our roads for buses to pull over to pick up and drop off passengers and especially the lack of any space to add streetcars. And of course light rail construction raises the forces of NIMBYism faster than a combination hog farm/shooting range/skateboard park/halfway house.
As with so many things, something that was simple and made sense 50-75 years ago has been institutionalized in our culture and public policy. It's going to take a lot of work to change that.
