Australia

If your two middle paragraphs are listed in order of priority

They are not. They were merely in the order it came to mind, based on context. Since the thread is primarily about road design, it's natural that the existence of public transport should come first. That's also why I started with "bus lanes" first, and not light rail. Bus lanes most directly compete with parking lanes, while light rail tends to compete indirectly (bus lanes literally being located in what would otherwise be parking space, while light rail tends to run down the centre but possibly requiring removal of parking to enable car lanes to continue to exist).

That said, I reject the notion that it needs to be done in a particular order. That's a surefire way to ensure nothing ever gets done, because you might say you need density for improved public transportation, but someone else will say they won't get rid of their car until there is first good alternatives.

But also, while higher density is certainly necessary for cyclability, I don't even believe it really is that necessary for public transportation to be viable. Remote US towns were built on the backbone of train networks. Rural towns in Europe have better public transport than much larger cities in America. Yes, increased density makes public transportation even more efficient, but efficiency is not a necessity for it to be viable. Only the political will to have it be good is necessary.

So I support, very strongly, any effort to improve public transport or increase density, regardless of whether it is done before, after, or alongside the other.

The fact that people are still trying to drive Dodge RAMs in undercover carparks and down city laneways suggests that failure of design is not the key issue. Fuckwits are the issue.

Designing city’s that encourage social transit over independent transport is one thing. Legislation to prevent people being selfish fuckwits and driving a “Light” Truck into your office job.

You dont want to force people away from cars u want to make public transport a better more appealing alternative.

It depends what you mean by "force." It isn't necessary to legislatively outlaw cars or anything like that, but you really do have to at least stop catering to cars if you ever want public transit to be good. More concretely, you have to change the zoning code to stop limiting density and forcing developers to build parking. That accomplishes two things: it allows there to be enough trip origins/destinations within walking distance of stations to make the transit viable, and it limits the available parking to only that which the free market is willing to provide (a lot less than zoning codes typically mandate now) which discourages driving by making it hard to find a place to park.

That's not actually "forcing" anything in reality, but a lot of car-brained people will tend to think it is because to people accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

(Another related example: NIMBYs think "abolish single-family zoning" means "prohibit building single-family houses," but it actually means "give property owners the freedom to build either single-family houses or multifamily buildings if they want." It's actually deregulation, but the people wedded to the highly-regulated status-quo will swear up and down that the proposed change is some kind of big-government communist plot.)

Yeah yeah yeah, meanwhile my street is much nicer without cars in it, and the shops are full of locals buying things. How sad that you car folks need to stay in your own neighborhoods instead of giving us all brain damage.

You dont want to force people away from cars u want to make public transport a better more appealing alternative

It really depends on what you mean by "force". Certainly we don't want to just ban cars, but in order to make public and active transport appealing, some restrictions on driving are necessary.

For example, at the moment you can drive from anywhere, to anywhere, via almost any route. This makes even local streets unnecessarily dangerous because people end up driving through unrelated local streets when that ends up being faster than sticking to main roads. Which in itself is making walking and cycling more dangerous, causing more people to drive instead.

If instead we used modal filters—sections of local streets that you can't drive through but can walk or ride through—that would definitely make driving seem "worse" because rat running would no longer be possible and access to local streets would be possible only via one route instead of 4 different ones, but it would also make walking and cycling better, too. It would make them safer, and would mean for some trips they can literally take a shorter journey.

This is just one example of good design. There are a number of other ways things can be designed better that might both help public and active transport users and hinder car use. Ironically, if done well, even all this would actually make driving better, because the number one problem for drivers at the moment is other drivers. And if you design well, you can reduce the number of other drivers, so anyone who continues to drive will have a better experience.

It's not about "forcing" anything. But it is about incentivising and disincentivising things to arrive at a better overall transport network.

Do car owners not have to pay any kind of tax supporting said public spaces?!?

Not in proportion to their fair share!

Or you could park a little bit further away and walk the remainder of the distance? It's not difficult.