That land rent generated by the transit should be used to pay for the service, making it self-financing. Rent-based public finance would also infill the city, making more productive use of city centers and reducing the outlying sprawl, thus reducing also the traffic coming in from the suburbs. So the second, longer-term, traffic decongestant would be a shift in taxes from income, sales, and buildings, to site rents, which would both pay for public transit and make cities more compact. Decongestant policy would be the opposite of what is done today. Policy taxes workers and lets landowners keep the rents generated by public transit.
Workers pay in taxes, lost time, and extra rent.
With decongestant policy, workers would be taxed less, not waste so much time, and there would also be less pollution. The public is ignorant. Big real-estate interests want to keep land taxes low, and car makers want to keep demand for cars high. Special interests get subsidized at the expense of an apathetic public. Someone should make an audio tape explaining the problem and the remedy, so that harried commuters can play this while they wait in traffic.