California will just go with the nuclear option: Cost of registering a vehicle will be based on vehicle emissions.
This will help EV’s get to the point where they’re cheaper.
However, we’re probably only 10-15 years away from EV’s becoming cheaper than ICE. At that point, we could stop the subsidy.
That’s about how long it takes to complete any mass transit project in the United States.
And then there's the people that see self-driving cars as the way out of the congestion. But self-driving cars will make congestion worse, by making single occupancy vehicle trips cheaper and easier, shifting more people from transit to cars. But then each self-driving car doubles the number of trips, since instead of someone driving to work and parking, a self-driving car will drop them off at work then drive off to look for another passenger or parking outside of downtown, so 2 trips for one passenger.
Cars ("vehicles") are part of our larger economic system, and that system does little to limit commutes. Only peoples own dislike of commuting keeps commute times down. Self-driving cars will make long commutes more tolerable, and thus raise the limiting factor on commutes.
I predict that if level-5 self-driving cars become a reality, we'll see a new type of dystopian hell, where it's common to spend 6+ hours a day commuting. It will be especially burdensome for those who are poor and have to drive their car manually.
Suddenly I'm less excited about self-driving cars.
City planning in the US is a mess though right now.
Yes, cheaper trips will lead to more trips and therefore more congestion.
But there are also advantages of having a massive car network.
There are actually plenty of roads for most of the time. It's only during rush hour that you have congestion (LA being an exception).
Rush hour traffic happens due to people commuting to work, usually one person in a car.
The density of rush hour traffic makes it easy to optimize.
Without changing cars, we can put 4 people in a car, which is 2-4x better than the common commute of 1 person in a car.
People don't want to share cars?
Implement rush hour pricing scheme that heavily penalizes single occupancy (say, $4 for shared ride, $16 if you want a car to yourself).
The next step would be to make mini-buses for rush hour traffic: at lest 12-16 person. Once you know the traffic patterns, you can optimize by building cars / busses with the capacity that fits the pattern.
What makes it even easier is that rush hour traffic is stable: people go to work and back roughly in the same numbers, which means you can do long-term predictions and investments.
Unless commute patterns change dramatically, in the morning most people will be going downtown to jobs, there will be a few that live in downtown and go to jobs elsewhere, but by and large, all of the cars will be bringing in commuters from outside of down and dropping them off in downtown centers -- there will be no other human looking for a ride from that car.
Without changing cars, we can put 4 people in a car, which is 2-4x better than the common commute of 1 person in a car.
We can do that today, but we don't. It's not clear why a self-driving car would change that. How often do people take uber-pool instead of having a car to themselves? (I don't know the answer to that question).
People don't want to share cars?
Maybe they won't want to, but as autonomous cars become more popular, only the affluent will make that choice - a car is expensive, especially when it sits in a garage at home and work (that you pay for) unused for 22 out of every 24 hours.
(Fixing this is easier said than done, though.)
I'm not sure that they could get away with _arbitrary_ amounts, but they can certainly provide justification for high costs for heavily polluting vehicles.
Unlike the current system, such a method would be retroactive and it would also apply to vehicles originally sold outside of California. I'm no expert, but I doubt that any automaker _wants_ this sort of thing to happen.
High vehicle registration fees was one of the major factors in the recall of Governor Davis back in 2003. It may have been just as big a factor as the electricity crisis. Voters really don't like seeing their car registration fees go up.
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_6,_Voter_Appr...
Just rumors of this happening are probably enough to impact sales in the USA's largest market.
You could do the same with natural gas furnaces. Put an excise tax on new ones and a program to help people to replace their old one with a heat pump.
This is better because the impression people would get is the state trying to help them do the right thing vs the beat poor people with a stick like carbon taxes do. (See France's Yellow Vests)
Everything gets more expensive and has the potential to effect even those who are in poverty who work those jobs as the employer can't afford extra employees due to the extra cost in trucks. Leaving a group of potential workers without employment.
You also negatively affect those who want to start a business (landscaping, catering, delivery). They now have to raise even more money to begin.
Regulations have downsides that may not be immediately apparent. California is already so stupidly expensive because of regulations it doesn't need to force it though. There is nothing stopping the manufacturers to continue being clean?
I'm in Silicon Valley and I see large SUVs and pickup trucks and gas-guzzling performance cars everywhere I look. In the rest of California there are even more SUVs and trucks.
...Vehicles that are currently illegal in California due to stricter emission control? (Unless I'm missing something...)