Is there sense in trying to make Americans forsake their cars by making driving in Berkeley only more objectionable? (which is, some say, the reason many Berkeley commission members support this and other measures impeding local automobile use.)

The Times reports that ridership on mass transit is surging thanks to high gasoline prices. Good. But … as of 2005, only 4.7 percent of American workers took mass transit to work. So even a 10% surge in mass transit ridership would take only around half a percent of drivers off the road. The point isn’t that nothing can be done — it’s just that serious reductions in driving would require a lot of long-term rearrangement of the way we live. It will come — but not quickly.
(Paul Krugman: "Sick Transit")

And there are, as always in America, the issues of race and class. Despite the gentrification that has taken place in some inner cities, and the plunge in national crime rates to levels not seen in decades, it will be hard to shake the longstanding American association of higher-density living with poverty and personal danger.
Still, if we're heading for a prolonged era of scarce, expensive oil, Americans will face increasingly strong incentives to start living like Europeans — maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives. (Krugman; Stranded in Surburbia)