Generally it start with charging a high daily congestion fee to drive into the city center. From there you expand the area. An 80k car that costs another 2-3k per year to drive into the city center, and maybe another 2-3k per year to park, at some point most people find it worthwhile to save the car for driving outside the city center.
Can't do that. The low and middle class here are also dependent on their banged up hatckbacks to get to work as they live very far from their jobs. If you make parking super expensive it's gonna hurt the Volkswagen man first and way harder than the Mercedes man.
Can't do what other cities have already done? How did those other cities do it, then?
If parking starts to carry its cost, rather than being subsidized by government regulation, then it quite likely becomes more economical to rely on mass transit than banged-up hatchbacks. But yes, changing from horribly-designed cities spread out over vast areas that depend on cars to navigate to human-oriented cities with effective mass transit is a huge project, and would require thinking about solutions that take into account the currently-hidden costs of the current designs.
