I mean, you don’t need cars to do that. Housing costs also fit the bill. Japan does a great job of imposing controls on its workforce by charging half your salary in rents and building “affordable” housing that deteriorates to the point of demolition every 30 years.

You can enclose your prime real estate and generate sizable profit on human labor without gobbling up a third of your turf with concrete slabs. If anything, this is part of the appeal of Ayn Rand’s vision of mass transit. Land is only valuable in proximity to rail infrastructure, so you gain immense leverage over the population based on where you plant terminals in the same way Americans gain leverage based on where they build and maintain roadways.

The outlays for rail just happen to be much higher and overhead much lower.