In Europe, gas taxes are famously high because car users are required to pay their way rather than get a free ride at the rest of society's expense. In the US, the private automobile driver is the biggest welfare user of them all. By all these means and more is driving subsidized by all of society in kind or through the governments. I refer of course to rail and bus systems, especially rail, which once built has lower maintenance costs than bus use, and which is far more efficient in its use of space and energy than any road-based system can be. In Europe, where nearly as many people own cars as in the United States, car use is lower, because cars are taxed in proportion to the social costs they incur, and public transport is subsidized as a benefit to all of society, even that part which does not use public transport.
People can perform their essential travel on foot, by bicycle, and on buses, trolleys, and subways.
Some values of public transport are obvious, some are not. One of the finest positive effects of public transport is that it can reestablish people in their own communities and in the agglomeration of communities that form a modern city. After all, instead of walking twenty feet from your door to your car and sealing yourself into it, you would be walking down the block to the bus stop, or around the corner to the subway station, and on the way you would certainly stop and say hello to your neighbor watering the lawn, to the local children on their way to school, or to the grocer getting off the bus herself to open her store. You would be part of your neighborhood and part of your city, instead of just another person with an address that is nothing more than a number in a book. Eliminating the giveaway that private automobile users now enjoy without thought or thanks, and using the cash to build up public transport systems and make them available to all at low or no charge, would go a long way towards making our cities livable again.