It's the same story repeating itself all over the world, even in my completely unremarkable central European town. Lefties centralize everything into the city, people have no choice but to commute, especially with skyrocketing housing prices in those cities and in any area that has good public transport (light rail etc.). That means people have no choice but to drive in every day, and the leftard solution to that is to make it as onerous and expensive as possible.
For example, my city started putting up "residential parking" zones, so that people who park on the streets pay a little bit if they're residents (was free previously of course) and insane amounts of money if they're non-residents and just work there. If your company doesn't provide parking, which almost none do, you're fucked. Commuters were told to leave their car at the outskirts and take public transport downtown. There are two problems with this, though: 1) There is ONE park&ride lot for the entire city, and it holds about 100 cars (tens of thousands commute by car from the surrounding area daily), and 2) public transport has been over capacity for over a decade.
A sane person would look at this and start supporting small towns, so that people could maybe live elsewhere and use local services instead, but that would take away money from endless social programs that do nothing but prop up a constantly expanding underclass of broken people dependent on handouts - and people who live in small towns aren't the kinds of degenerates who vote left, so fuck them. A sane person would also do something about the outrageous property prices and the fucking AirBNB epidemic, which displaces working people to outside the town and forces them to commute, the law has tools to handle this, but allowing people to afford their own place to live without depending on the government is antithetical to the left's philosophy, so fuck you, peasant.
It's the same story repeating itself all over the world, even in my completely unremarkable central European town. Lefties centralize everything into the city, people have no choice but to commute, especially with skyrocketing housing prices in those cities and in any area that has good public transport (light rail etc.). That means people have no choice but to drive in every day, and the leftard solution to that is to make it as onerous and expensive as possible.
For example, my city started putting up "residential parking" zones, so that people who park on the streets pay a little bit if they're residents (was free previously of course) and insane amounts of money if they're non-residents and just work there. If your company doesn't provide parking, which almost none do, you're fucked. Commuters were told to leave their car at the outskirts and take public transport downtown. There are two problems with this, though: 1) There is ONE park&ride lot for the entire city, and it holds about 100 cars (tens of thousands commute by car from the surrounding area daily), and 2) public transport has been over capacity for over a decade.
A sane person would look at this and start supporting small towns, so that people could maybe live elsewhere and use local services instead, but that would take away money from endless social programs that do nothing but prop up a constantly expanding underclass of broken people dependent on handouts - and people who live in small towns aren't the kinds of degenerates who vote left, so fuck them. A sane person would also do something about the outrageous property prices and the fucking AirBNB epidemic, which displaces working people to outside the town and forces them to commute, the law has tools to handle this, but allowing people to afford their own place to live without depending on the government is antithetical to the left's philosophy, so fuck you, peasant.