Priorities!

California faces a budget deficit so they cut $1 billion from mass transit funding. This kind of thing, of course, is crucial to understanding the urban/suburban/exurban balance in American life. We get sprawl because people want to move out to these far flung places. But by the same token, nobody would want to move out to them if roads didn't go there. A patch of affordable land near a well-maintained road that's connected to a network of other well-maintained roads is an attractive place to live. A patch of affordable land that's connected by a crude trail to a dirt road isn't.

Similarly, if you never make building and maintaining the infrastructure of less car-dependent lifestyles a priority, people wind up not wanting to live those lifestyles. It's all perfectly understandably, but it'll ultimately be very, very, very hard to get climate emissions under control without some increase in the number of families living with fewer than one car per adult.