People bring up the concept of disincentivizing cars all the time. Many activists in local politics in urban areas have ideological problems with mass car use, and try to advocate for and enact anti-car, pro-public-transit policies.

The problem is, cars are extremely useful to most people in the US, public transit has very real inherent downsides, and local policies that disincentivize car use are very unpopular when actually implemented. Voting citizens get mad when the price of gas goes up and demand that their elected officials do something about it (also electrification of cars, which is proceeding apace, makes gasoline prices less important for ordinary people and also reduces some of the real negative externalities of cars).

I have used both urban public transit and cars regularly to get around, I'm personally familiar with the upsides and downsides of both, and while I definitely do want public transit infrastructure to be good, I frankly do not trust the motives of anti-car urbanist activists. I think they are willing to make the lives of most people on aggregate worse because they think private car ownership is in some sense immoral and so overweight the downsides of cars and underweight the downsides of public transit.

Also using drive-by shootings and car-break-ins as an anti-car argument is pretty disingenuous. This is a problem with criminals committing directly-violent crime or property crime against ordinary people, not with cars per se. Criminals absolutely commit crimes against people using public transit, and indeed one of the major problems with public transit is that it puts you in a closed space with random members of the public who might commit crimes against you (e.g. the Jordan_Neely incident, the random stabbing of Iryna_Zarutska, the less-widely-reported random crime incidents that happen regularly on urban public transit systems). One of the most important public policy measures that could be enacted to make public transit better is severe and consistent policing of public order crimes on transit - and of course more severe policing is also a potential solution to car drive-bys and break-ins.

> and try to advocate for and enact anti-car, pro-public-transit policies

If you're lucky. Sometimes you just get anti-car. I'd love to not need a car at all, but where I am now it would mean Ubering instead because they've made driving worse while transit isn't expanded to fit the gap.