A cost driven incentive can still be viable. It needs to be accompanied by practical replacement solutions. For example, if driving cars becomes too expensive for people, then public transport needs investments and needs to cover more ground, to help people out.
Yep. I think they need to implement a "Fuel cost equivalent tariff" on public transport. FCET because everyone switching from a car needs to do this gradually so you can't include the depreciation etc because they are sunk costs. It costs me ~£65 for 50l of fuel which gets me about 450-500 miles in my car. If I'm travelling alone I should be able to buy a walk-up train ticket for that price, with a 20% discount for pre-planning my journey. If I'm travelling with my family then group tickets should be discounted so each extra person is a nominal extra amount as long as we all travel together. Tickets should be integrated across all transport modes like they are in Switzerland.
The big problem with this, in the UK at least, is that the trains are already full even though they are much more expensive than this. We really need more capacity but the hugely corrupt debacle that is High speed 2 is going to turn people against building better public transport.
