You are looking at the cost in your pocket, not the aggregate.

Add the cost of the gas needed to power all these cars, plus the cost of the land allocated solely for parking, plus the costs of the roads, plus the costs in healthcare associated with air pollution, plus the environmental cost of all the concrete and steel need to build and maintain the roads, etc.

It's not just "car ownership", it's "car-centric infrastructure" that is expensive.

Even with no cars, we'd still need roads. The majority of the wear on them isn't from passenger vehicles.

Because car-based roads are so fucking noisy, we throw a ton of green space and front yards to mitigate it. Not to mention "sidewalks" are unnecessary when you can just walk in the centre of the street.

The size of a traditional road is about 6 metres wide or less (that's measured from the front wall of the building on one side, to the front wall of the building on the opposite side). In comparison, the same wall-to-wall measure of a car-centric suburban street comes out to, IIRC, 20-30 metres. That's 3-5x the cost in just land alone, let alone maintenance.

And yes, we will need some roads - about 20% or so, as arterial roads. But right now we're closer to 100%, and most of the throughput of arterial roads is tied up in one-occupant passenger vehicles rather than actually necessary cargo/tradie vehicles.

> Even with no cars, we'd still need roads.

But you'd need less of them.

> The majority of the wear on them isn't from passenger vehicles.

Correct, but irrelevant. The I-93 around Boston does not have 4-6 lanes each way because they have lots of trucks during rush hour.