Inconveniencing Cars

12 Aug, 2025

I live in the US, where there are a lot of cars. And while I'm not anti-car, I am all for car alternatives - bikes and trains and buses for example. Also, while I'm not against cars as transportation, I am slightly bothered by the semi-widespread mindset that the only viable way to get anywhere is by car, and that it's absolutely essential that everyone own a car.
With that being said, to motivate others to consider non-car alternatives, I've come up with a few ways of making cars-as-transportation more 'inconvenient' in the hopes that implementation of these features will push people away from cars to more diverse forms of transportation.¹

(Note: Most of these suggestions are meant to be applied to an urban setting. As such, I'll use the word "downtown" a lot, defined by areas with high car and people flow (and high congestion)).

Some ways to inconvenience cars:

1. Remove free parking. If you want, this article is great on the economics of parking and the main takeaway is that that parking is too damn cheap. Naturally then, a simple way to make driving slightly more inconvenient is to increase the cost of parking in a public area as at the very least, pricing parking gives driving around an explicit cost.
   If you want to go even further, eliminate urban curbside parking altogether and have individuals park in designated parking structures. And charge them for parking in those parking structures while you're at it.

2. Make lanes narrower²³. Narrow lanes make roads harder to drive, and that makes driving more inconvenient as the task of driving becomes harder the narrower the lane. Perhaps some would be discouraged to drive as a result.
   An interesting other idea for reducing the number of cars on the road is reducing the number of lanes on some roads. It's known that adding more lanes to a highway doesn't speed it up, so following that logic, perhaps removing some lanes from the highway (or roads in general) won't slow things down substantially.

3. Raise the "tax" of using a car. In some sense, owning a car is 'taxed' as every year we all pay to have a valid license plate. As such, a simple way to make people drive less is to increase the cost of owning/using a car, which can be accomplished by raising the cost of a license plate.⁴

4. Higher driving "penalties" -- e.g. higher speeding ticket penalties, more severe DUI/Drunk Driving penalties. At the very least, such proposals if implemented would give local governments more money to do stuff.

An obvious point thing to mention is that inconveniencing cars doesn't cause there to be less cars if there's no viable transportation alternative. As such, for any of the above proposals to work, they have to be done in conjunction with a strengthening of car alternatives. This means investment into more buses, more bike paths, and better subway/metro/train systems.

Overall however, if we (societally) want to start moving away from cars, more needs to be done than small nudges towards alternatives -- most likely there needs to be a shift in the way we look at transportation. But as a starting point, small nudges and proposals like the ones written about above can be a simple way to encourage people to look for alternate modes of transportation.