I only have one car because I ride a train from a station 1/2 mile from my house to my office, which is 2 blocks from the center city station. My wife uses the car for errands, as she doesn't work. In much of the built up area of Philadelphia and its suburbs where I live, it is difficult to find a house more than 2 mile from a commuter train line. And the commuter trains go places with roughly 1/3 of the regions jobs readily accessible, mostly Center City and local business districts in Philly, but also certian major suburban office parks, like Radnor and Conshohocken.
Its an extremely pleasant and much more affordable lifestyle (no 2nd $5000-6000 per year car to pay for), and my only gripe is that my property taxes and gas taxes go to subsidize big whiners like you who would never dream of supporting $4 per gallon gas taxes to get cars to pay their true costs, rather than mooching off gas taxes derived from local road mileage, said roads being paid for by local property taxes, and not gas taxes.
You don't know anything about how the cities of Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Apex, Chapel Hill and the others in the area are structured and where employers are located. Trust me, train will fail here. IBM and Cisco are 2 of the major employers in the area. Each of their locations cover more than 10,000 acres. I sure hope that the train will stop in front of my building, if not I have one hell of a f**king walk. Oh, not to mention that the closest train station to my house is going to be 15 miles away!
And the socialized central planners who designed RTP, where most people here work, are at fault for the traffic problems to begin with and now those same people want to "Fix" the problem they created with a big giant waste of tax money. How did they create the problem and what is the problem? Well, the problem is traffic, commuter traffic. And why is it a problem? It is a problem because when they designed and zoned "The Park" they zoned it so that there was NO residential property allowed. Thus insuring that there would be 100% commuter employment. If they had allowed residential developement, both subdivisions and high density we would not have the traffic problems they are trying to fix. People who worked in the park would live in the park. An entire city would have been created at it would have been self sustaining. But no, the social engineers who knew best then think they know best now. They were wrong then and they are wrong now.
Several states fund roads with nothing but gas taxes. For example, Nevada pays for its roads (which are typically in very good shape) with just a gas tax. The logic being that the tax will scale with the amount of road usage. California does not do this (I believe their road funding comes from the general fund) and has some of the worst roads in the west. The price of gas in Nevada is typically about the same as it is in California and sometimes a little cheaper. So clearly it doesn't have to cost that much.
What this doesn't take into account is the relative efficiency of the road building agencies in various states. California spends something like 12 times as much money per road mile per year as Nevada, and with much worse results. CalTrans is widely considered the gold standard of gross inefficiency, so this has to be taken into consideration when you calculate how much a gas tax would have to be. I personally prefer the Nevada model, since if people stopped driving the agency would become defunded (currently though, they seem to have more money and time than they know what to do with and have resorted to adding non-essentials to the road system since the roads are pretty much in excellent shape).