It seems there is at least one good point in the article, if US regulations require that property developers also provide certain minimum levels of parking whether they want to or not. On the other hand, as someone who comes from England, where some of our local authorities very much have that "aggressively anti-car policy" you mentioned and it's more likely that local regulations will prohibit a property developer from providing the expected (by customers) level of parking at a new property, I would like to give some other perspectives.

For one thing, there is an entitlement culture here, because motorists are arguably the most over-taxed group in our population. The bottom line is that motorists pay around £50B/year in direct motoring-related taxation, while only around £10B/year is spent on maintaining and developing our road network. Slapping obviously punitive charges for parking on roads we've already paid for five times over is, understandably enough, politically unpopular.

You mentioned London several times, but London is something of a special case because of its population density and the viability of providing a comprehensive public transport system as an alternative. Most cities in the UK do not have the level of bus service that London does, or any alternatives at all like the London Underground.

In the end, people drive because it is useful. It saves time compared to other modes of transport, other than walking or cycling over relatively short distances. It allows you to take plenty of physical goods with you if you need to. And of course it is much more pleasant to ride in your own vehicle than to sit in an uncomfortable seat, next to someone stinking of whatever they just ate or drank, in a cabin that is so humid the windows have all steamed up, in the middle of winter when several other passengers have kindly brought colds and other bugs with them to share in the fertile breeding environment that public transportation typically provides.

If you think you can reduce the amount of driving we do without taking this usefulness into account, you're crazy. This was summed up neatly in a post on another forum I saw recently, which observed that in one small town centre, a key retail site went through this transition once the local council decided to make money off parking:

Waitrose -> Safeway -> Kwiksave -> empty -> Poundland

For those not in the UK, that starts with one of the nicer general stores with a reputation for selling good quality food and so on, then moves through progressively cheaper stores selling products that aren't as good, finally reaching a store where they basically sell everything at £1 to people without the money to shop anywhere else. Apparently two other big name supermarkets moved out of town to where they could still offer free parking, so those who drive could still go there but anyone living locally in the town centre who didn't have a car lost out.

Public transport can be a sensible alternative where a critical mass of passengers exists, triggering economies of scale in financial cost, environmental impact and land use. However, apart from in really big cities like London, that is rarely the case outside a fairly narrow window of time around the average working day. Running a bus service in the evening is madness in environmental and financial terms, but if you advocate a modal shift from car use to bus use it becomes a political necessity. Did I mention that a lot of the pro-bus propaganda is outright lies in environmental terms, since it typically assumes far higher than average bus passenger numbers vs. single occupany car journeys, and it tends to focus on specific carbon-based pollutants (where buses are better per passenger-mile than cars) while ignoring much nastier things like particulates and sulphur-based pollutants (where buses are typically much worse, as anyone living in the centre of bus-friendly cities here in the UK is now learning to their cost). Public transport advocacy also typically talks about effects "per passenger-mile", while conveniently ignoring the indirect nature of public transport that means a passenger travelling between the same origin and destination might go a lot further along the way.

As for trains, they have their advantages, but economics isn't one of them: I'm not sure there is any heavy rail network in the world that would actually be profitable without massive government subsidies that directly or indirectly support it. It's already far cheaper to drive or to fly(!) than to get the train to most places here in the UK, regular rail passengers are always complaining about high fares, yet they aren't even close to paying the true cost of their journey on the ticket price. If you want to make a serious argument about market forces driving transport provisions, start by abolishing trains entirely (and then discover that these things do not operate in a vacuum and there are consequences to that decision beyond the direct operating budget of the railway network).

Do we drive too much today? Yes, we do. Many people lose a huge amount of time they could be spending being productive or enjoying themselves, just sitting in a car instead. Lots of land is devoted to road space, even in densely populated areas like big cities, that could have been put to other uses. There is a significant amount of environmental damage any way you look at it.

But why do we drive too much? That is the real question. It's all very well having critics claiming that building new roads only results in higher traffic demand, but cars don't appear from nowhere and people mostly don't drive for no reason. The extra traffic appears when new roads are built because people want to make a journey, and the latent demand was not adequately served by the existing transport options before the new road.

The solution to all of these problems is "simply" to reduce the number of journeys we need to make. In a modern world, we have communication options that were not available even a few years ago. If you work in a customer-facing role or doing any sort of manual labour, then of course you need to be physically present where the work is. However, how many people are getting into their cars and driving for an hour or more every day just to be in the same office as their colleagues, to whom they will only speak on a few occasions during the day while otherwise keeping to themselves and getting on with their work anyway? There is obviously a need for both communication and socialising even in these jobs, but there are many other arrangements that could provide time to do these things -- and probably in much more efficient or satisfying ways -- than the daily drive to work at a central office with fixed or near-fixed hours.

Maybe, instead of trying to artificially reduce demand for car journeys, we should be looking at the lifestyles we lead today and why people need to make all those journeys in the first place?