If behaviour like that is a primary reason (or excuse) for much private car use, then the combined effect of enforcement and the resulting change in the majority of ordinary users will reduce it to a level that it ceases to be a deterrent to those wedded to their cars.
Defiant attitudes like this require action from governments to make (unnecessary) car use less attractive. One likely measure will be the introduction of universal road charging. No longer will the current assumption that the car is the default mode for getting about when there is a marginal cost of actually using the road. It will probably be the mandatory fitting of telematics to private cars that will be used to aggregate the total road charge.
How very Orwellian.
You are just making yourself sound silly. Please try to understand that the overwhelming majority of passenger journeys are by road and can only practically be made by road. How do you know that my car pumps out fumes, for all you know I may have an electric car. I do not drive everywhere and I am in good health and take a long walk at least three times a week just for the pleasure of it. I use public transport when it makes sense, such as going in to London, but for most of the journeys I do there simply is not a public transport option and highly unlikely ever to be one, and taking public transport can be and often is much more stressful than driving, which I have never found stressful in the least, even when I was doing seventy to eighty thousand miles a year.
Do you not have any vision for a better future? The attitudes you describe are probably true of many people today, but culture and people's attitudes can change, you know.
A story that might be relevant: In the early 1980s, after I'd started becoming involved in politics as a teenager, I stopped going to Labour Party meetings because it was at the time normal for people to smoke in meetings, without any consideration of the effects their smoke had on those sitting around them. And - bluntly - I couldn't stand breathing in all the smoke. The local chairman (ironically, a non-smoker) asked why I'd stopped going, and when I explained, his response was along the lines of, "Well that's a shame, but it's tough really because you'll never ever get people to give up their cigarettes." That was clearly a man with no vision of a better future - at least as far as smoking was concerned. And hey, look where we are now, little more than 30 years later. Today, it would be almost unthinkable to smoke in a public meeting!
Perhaps you should ask yourself whether you are now that man, as far as transport is concerned
Of course, one other thing: We are in the happy much-less-smoking place today because successive Governments realised the problems that smoking caused, and accepted the responsibility of campaigning to make people aware of the harm from tobacco. Imagine where we'd be if, instead, successive Governments had adopted the view along the lines of, Hey, people want to smoke. So let's support it. We'll make sure that the taxes smokers pay go to make it easier for them to smoke. Hey, let's magic up £30 billion in the budget to encourage smokers and make it more pleasant for people to smoke...
Is that the kind of future you want for transport? One where the Government just throws billions of pounds at encouraging whatever most people currently want to do, completely ignoring the harm that 'what people want to do' causes to others and to wider society, and without any thought for trying to change people's attitudes?
The problem though is that electric cars only solve some, not all, of the problems caused by over-dependence on driving. A push towards electric vehicles combined with a push towards public transport would be a lot better!I would say in your analogy that electric cars a like vaping, not perfect, still damaging to others but a big improvement on what came before. They're sadly also both a distraction from a better long term aim.Yes I am well aware of that push towards electric vehicles... To that extent, the smoking/cars analogy is imperfect
And sure, you are still going to need roads. But I think the point is, that, if you had a decent sustainable transport policy that involved improving public transport and informing people about the problems that cars cause, then you probably wouldn't need many more roads than we already have today - so there would be no point in spending an eye-watering £30bn on road schemes. (Obviously you'd be spending smaller amounts on maintaining/modifying the roads we already have, and there would be odd isolated cases where new roads would be required).
Interesting that I was thinking about part of a conversation here on traffic in St Albans. ISTR both you and Bald Rick agreed that congestion was limiting the number of commuters driving to the station. I think that is one of the possible scenarios that will be repeated across the country. As the capacity of roads and of car parks flattens out in city (and town) centres, of necessity, drivers will find alternatives to taking two tons of machine, occupying 8 sq metres of space a couple of miles to the local station. In the last 2-3 years, there has been an improvement in commuter bus services from the edge of St Albans to the station. In addition many more people walk the journey (via the Alban Way) or even cycle, - and St Albans is not a particularly cycle-friendly terrain. I can't firn the number of cycle parking slots there but it is probably now over 1500.