h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There is an answer and that is in the polluters pockets... MONEY!

If it costs every time you go out you'll go out less.
Perhaps the "Boom Box Brigade" will spend their pocket money on things less offensive.

Over- high taxation and artificially high running costs will kill the goose that laid the golden egg....the government needs people to use their cars to fill the exchequer with loadsamoney via indirect taxation, to meet the shortfall created by their messing-up of the country's bank balance.

I know it's an overly simplistic ideal, but I'd tax them off the road too, and put the money directly into public transport.

Oops! The Government need sthe revenue from car-related taxes to pay for.... all the costs that cars inflict on society. Like the obesity pandemic, pollution-related illness, costs of treating road accident victims, to say nothing of lost taxation and productivity from the three thousand-odd who die on the roads every year. Road crashes are the single largest cause of death in the under 14 age group, and research shows that in crashes involving cars and children the children take evasive action more often than the car drivers. Scary.

Recent hikes in fuel and vehicle excise duties have seen the tax revenue from cars approaching the attributable costs for the first time ever - but that takes no account of the fact that the entire road network was built out of general taxation, so we are effectively driving on the national debt. The Road Fund (abolished before I was born, and the last hypothecated road tax in the UK) never came close to covering the costs of road building. From memory about 1/3 of the cost of a road could be met from the Road Fund.