But Dr Terrill said the easiest and cheapest solution was to implement congestion charge

This is the kind of thinking that got us into this mess. If you want people to take PT then improve PT rather than making non-PT worse. Don’t punish people for suffering at the hands of a problem that decades of successive governments, the same ones that now want to charge them for it, have created, contributed to, or simply ignored. If someone has spent tens of thousands on something that costs thousands more to register, insure, fuel, and maintain, so they can sit in a stop-start grind for 60-90 min just to get to work, how bad must the alternatives be?

The simple fact is every day heaps of people are trying to get to or from the same place at the same time. PT definitely helps, and would have to remain part of the solution in one form or another, but ultimately it still masks the same place, same time issue. I can’t help but think that getting away from the “CBD” mindset would remove so many issues. And shorter term, stop trying to force people back into the office. Less people needing to go anywhere at all, and those that do aren’t all converging on the same point. Winning.

Of course you also have groups like CBD landlords, car manufacturers, fuel companies etc etc as well as govt budgets that have a vested interest in things not changing, and the safest political move is to just take more money from people who will grumble, but have no choice but to cough up. Rinse and repeat.

Shitting on cars seems popular but imho that is lazy activism, the problem isn’t “cars”, it’s a bunch of things all contributing to them being necessary in situations where they shouldn’t be.