Perhaps a few people did. But nowhere near wnough to justify a $4Billion earmark.
In truth, the industry analysts themselves said after watching the sales trends and looking at surveys purchasers done at the time of purchase that the CFC program had simply stolen sales from the immediate future that would have ocurred anyway. The data showed it to be causal.
While I’m sure there were incidences of corruption involved, inner city light rail systems, and even regular rail systems, disappeared because they were no longer competitive…with cars and trucks. It was simple economics. If enough people prefreed rails to cars, rails would prosper…but they don’t.
Residential construction moved to the suburbs because that’s what people wanted to buy. Shopping malls then followed, because the market was there. Urban planners work as best they can to make the cities as friendly as possible, but they cannnot and ao not control where the people buy.
And, as already pointed out, trying to combine cars and trucks at highway speeds with pedestrians and bicyclists (or even motor scooters) is just plain deadly. Modern highways are designed to allow sustained high speeds as safely as possible, and allowing slow moving objects to be there simply puts everyone at risk.
By the way, alternate transportation is not illegal. My son commutes to work on a bike, as do many, many others. And I personally have used my bikes for transportation purposes countless times, for many years. Now, however, I’m disabled. What would you have me do? Limp the 31 miles to work?