Has the median net worth of those driving gone up? Vancouver did all sorts of “make having a car really expensive” moves like removing parking lots and making the remaining ones prohibitively expensive for the working class. Must be nice for all the supercar drivers to have fewer poor people clogging up the roads!
The only way to reduce congestion is to have fewer cars on the roads, so someone's got to stop driving, and the rich will find a way to make it not them. You can either charge an honest price and spend the revenue on public services, or you can adopt worse policies. (E.g. some cities make it so different cars are allowed in the city on alternate days - so rich people own two cars and alternate).
I've never really understood this argument. Road (and parking) capacity in the middle of a dense city is a limited resource. In a capitalist country, having costs associated with consuming limited resources is how you figure out how to allocate them. Demanding that limited resources be available to everyone for free just guarantees shortages. And a non-economic method of allocating those resources, like say a lottery, has the downside of making it so that those who need the resource can't obtain it at any price and fails to create economic incentives to explore alternatives.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the sentiment. It would be great if every single person who wanted to do so could easily drive into the middle of even the busiest downtown areas and park with no additional cost. But that's not practical, so we need an alternative. And it's extremely telling that for all the complaining about congestion pricing, there seem to be few proposed alternatives.
