We did perfect their mass production, and it propelled us to the world's largest economy. The only country with better GDP growth over the last 100 years is Japan, and that's in large part because they perfected the manufacture of cars themselves.
Right, it's not the geopolitical situation, but cars. Natural resources + every potentially powerful hostile country is across entire oceans = success.
I mean... Toyota would beg to differ (and realistically US car manufacturers today are closer to the Toyota model of car mass production than the traditional US one).
But we're talking about New York City here, not Kansas. Specifically the congestion zone which during the work day is the most congested place in the world (187,500 people/sqm).
> I like walking around new cities, but a lot of people are car life types
Congestion pricing makes driving in New York better. Broadly speaking, the tendency for someone to have a problem with the scheme is proportional to their distance from and inversely related to the amount of time they've ever spent in New York.