Alternatives naturally become more viable over time as more and more people find car use impossible, but its kind of hard to tell in advance which lanes of public transport are most necessary to improve. So imo the best solution is just to do it, and then see what happens and adapt. It's too hard to plan out everything in advance, and if you try you get deadlocked politically and nothing ends up happening. So you just find the best lever you can to reduce traffic immediately, and just start pressing it. But you warn everyone that you're pressing it, and when you do so you do it slowly.

The reality is that a lot of traffic is simply unnecessary, and dissipates once you add some friction. The most extreme example of that is the rise of remote work during and after Covid. As it turns out, none of these people actually needed to go anywhere.

And more generally, cars induce their own demand simply by virtue of being the fastest and most comfortable option, and they shape the environment around them to depend on them. Small local shops get outcompeted by distant behemoths due it being more convenient to drive. People move to a large house in a distant suburb rather than a small apartment because they know it's just thirty minutes away from work by car anyways. The easier it is to drive, the more entrenched driving becomes. And any way you slice it, undoing that process will cause pain, so you might as well go ahead and start, because you're never going to find a way to prevent the consequences anyway.

Generally, restrictions on cars make public transport better automatically, as they make buses work better.

None of the changes in the comment make owning a car impossible, they just make driving marginally less privileged over walking and biking.

Well I sold off my car after realizing I enjoyed the bike ride to work. Then a year later an older family member had a health crisis requiring hospital visits at all possible times of the day and night for many months. Couldnt always rely on cabs and that was the only time I regretted selling the car. But we got through it with friends and fam sharing transport duties. Quite a crazy period so I could imagine it becoming real complicated for certain issues.

Effectively NIMBYism, but for cars. The political backlash would stop all progress. People don’t like change, even for the better.

There are places where car is simply the mean of transport - to the point where using the car is preferred to literally a five minutes walk.

In contexts like this, using a car is perceived as a right - restricting usage doesn't make people think "I'll take the chance to use the bike", rather "How the f*ck do I get there now?".

You have not heard people complaining about cities impeding traffic, likely, because of the bubble you live in. That is the thing that makes regular people to run for the city offices. A whole lot of recent "urbanization" is not going to survive for long because of this IMHO.