Also worth noting that comparing capital costs of underground transit to above ground private travel is pretty apples and oranges. Buses would be fairer comparison IMO.

We’ve ended up with such car-centric cities (in the U.S.) thanks in part to the presence of ample free (subsidized) parking thanks to parking minimums and free street parking. If the cost of parking was actually borne by car owners, it would reduce car ownership thanks to higher cost. This is less true today thanks to car ownership being near-mandator, but with the right investments that can change. I’d describe parking minimums as a regulation against non-car owners as they still pay in part for the parking spaces required by their apartment/home/every business they visit in most cases.

As an aside, have you looked at how parking minimums are often set? It’s only loosely correlated with the goal of sufficient parking.

One such example is paint & coloring in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the book - “In 1862, British firms controlled about 50 percent of the world market and French firms another 40 percent, with Swiss and German companies as marginal players. By 1873, German companies had 50 percent of the market, while French, Swiss, and British firms controlled between 13 percent and 17 percent each. In 1913, German firms had a market share of more than 80 percent, the Swiss had about 8 percent, and the rest of the world had disappeared.” Switzerland at the time had no patent protection, and Germany allowed processes to be patented in 1877 but not products themselves.

Parallels are harder to find today due to the expansion of IP law as a condition of trade with many developed nations, but the book does have some more recent examples.

I’d be curious how many actual world-changing innovations were ONLY pursued because of the existence of copyright, that don’t belong to a class of innovation (like pharmaceuticals) that could have a solution, whether copyright, subsidies, or something else applied to the industry as a whole. I don’t doubt that there are some, but I would be shocked if their benefit isn’t dwarfed by the innovation lost to the anticompetitive nature of patents and copyright.

It seems to me that it’s an exceptional case that there’s some idea that’s would benefit society but is only economically viable under the current copyright regime. But our laws apply protections that are only needed in this rare instance to all ideas. I highly recommend “Against Intellectual Monopoly” by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. It changed how I view IP a great deal, and the final chapters are dedicated to how we could practically transition away from our current system.

Even so, I think in most cases if a piece of software has been unedited for 10 years it’s either feature-complete or obsolete. If it’s been under development for those 10 years, the original version being released into the public domain probably isn’t a significant threat to innovation by way of closed source improvements being made.