I agree the carrot (e.g. better urban planning ) should be used long before the stick (e.g. fines etc), but this idea of the stick has gotten way out of hand in the minds of the conspiracy theorists.
The only place I can see which is trialling a user fee checkpoint system is Oxford UK, which is a highly walkable old city whose CBD was built centuries before the era of the automobile, and where a congestion charge ("the stick") actually makes sense because the carrot is already largely in place.
So again, the conspiracy theory of "you will own nothing and you will be happy" need not be applied here.
