Sounds like relying more on a gas tax would have been the better way to go. Distortionary taxes really need to be careful they are distortionary in the desired way.
A family with both parents working, living economically ie. not in an urban center, needs to drive a car to make ends meet. You can't do shopping for a family, and definitely not in economical sizes, on a bike or in a bus. They are hit hard by high gas costs, while a well-off urban professional takes his SUV to go skiing in Italy because it's still cheaper than flying+renting a car when he gets there.
You need a pretty big family before doing shopping by bus is not feasible.
I'm 34, Norwegian, have lived most of my life in Norway and England, and have no drivers license. Never learned to drive, because I've never felt the need to.
I do the family shopping for my small family of 3 on my commute home. I rarely need to pick anything up more than 2-3 times a week, and usually I only need one "big" round of shopping per week. It's never so much that I can't take it with me on the train, then walk to the bus stop and take it with me on the bus, in addition to my fairly heavy bag of gym shoes + clothes. If we had another child or two I might end up going to the shops once more a week, or my wife might end up having to help out with the shopping more often.
While I might've saved a little bit here and there on buying larger quantities, not having the cost of car makes up for it many times over.
For that matter, not having a car saves us so much that we can easily afford delivery charger and/or taking a cab back if we ever want to do really large amounts of shopping, and still save money.
In other words: Apart from a really small number of people that live in so rural areas that they are not properly served by public transport (I'm talking about Europe here) and are too far away to walk, it's not about needs but about perceived convenience.
But I don't even want a car. Apart from the cost, there's all the hassle of keeping it in a decent condition. I'd rather just pay for the service on the rare occasions I need it. Though I may consider getting a drivers license to at least have the option of renting a driverless car now and again.
This is really interesting, because I think a lot of cycling advocates in the US believe that Europe is some sort of utopia where this sort of situation just doesn't exist. The images most of us see from Copenhagen or Amsterdam are filled with families in bakfiets and beautiful people dressed to the 9s on their city bikes.
Has anyone (without an agenda) actually run the numbers on whether having a smaller number of older cars is actually less environmentally friendly than having a larger number of more regularly renewed cars with more modern engines (and more scrapped cars)?
I can easily get behind encouraging people to replace 10 year-old central heating boilers with more efficient models, for cars it seemed more like a bizarre industry specific subsidy.
