I think the idea is to penalize car ownership in places where you "shouldn't" need one.
If you're courageous, you could live in downtown Dallas without a car (can move around a bit with DART). Making it harder to own a car (combined with more "dense-city" developments) doesn't seem like the worst idea. Mainly because we could recover the huuuge parking lots.
And when you want to go to Austin for the weekend you can rent a car.
In any case, even if the entire state is still very much "car necessary", you can still try to incentivise pockets of the state to be less so.
If you're courageous, you could live in downtown Dallas without a car (can move around a bit with DART). Making it harder to own a car (combined with more "dense-city" developments) doesn't seem like the worst idea. Mainly because we could recover the huuuge parking lots.
And when you want to go to Austin for the weekend you can rent a car.
In any case, even if the entire state is still very much "car necessary", you can still try to incentivise pockets of the state to be less so.