> I don't understand how people can simultaneously hold this belief and then act surprised when others criticize the "green movement" as just an excuse to control people.

Massive subsidies to the entire car industry, from cheap roads to cheap gas, are a form of nudging society towards certain behaviors.

Building reliable mass transit, proper safe isolated bike lanes, and removing subsidies that are in place, are another form of societal nudging.

As an example, wide city streets are a form of subsidy, the city loses money on those streets, a 4 lane road in a downtown region of a major metro is a huge lost opportunity cost! But a combination of political and societal factors came together to cause cities sacrifice buildings for for car lanes.

> Modern personal transportation is one of the ultimate expressions of individual freedom.

I personally enjoy driving, but when visiting cities with real mass transit (Tokyo, London, etc), I feel a lot more free to travel within the city. No being stuck in traffic, transit times are a lot more reliable than driving, no worrying about finding parking and then walking to my destination, and no worries about not being able to find parking at all!

And in cities with "almost there" mass transit, such as Boston, so long as you are on the transit lines, everything is incredibly nice.

Honestly I think Bostonians complain about their transit system too much, whenever I visit Boston I am very pleased with MBTA's service!

> We're making it cleaner, we're reducing externalities, and still environmentalists want to herd people onto busses and trains.

Individual transit has huge external costs. From giant parking lots everywhere, to the fact that it just doesn't scale[1]. Cities cannot grow beyond a certain size/density relying on individual transit. Self driving car's don't solve the density problem, while self driving taxis kind of solve the parking lot problem[2].

For that matter, an underground parking space in a condo in a metro area costs around $30k to build! Want two spaces for a family? That is $60k added to the purchase price. Housing that isn't incredibly expensive? Not going to happen if there is a $60k tax added to the price of every new housing unit in a city![3]

No one is arguing to build out mass transit in every single small town, but for the majority of the population that lives in metro areas, mass transit makes an enormous amount of sense.

[1]https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif

[2]Parking lots have lower tax rates, being unimproved land, than land with proper building on them. This reduction in revenue, for land in the most valuable part of the city, has obvious large $ costs. Of course cities can get around this by special taxes for parking lots to discourage them, but without proper mass transit in place, people still need to drive into a cities dense downtown core, and fees just get passed along to citizens. It becomes more efficient to just build mass transit, and put in proper building rather than concrete flatlands! Mass transit is a large up-front cost with rather low on-going maintenance costs compared to road ways (unless you are NYC and manage to defer maintenance for several decades...), but the property taxes from the additional land that is freed up is an ongoing revenue source that will last for centuries. Unfortunately few politicians care about "well the city will be super vibrant for the rest of time".

[3]Obviously only applicable once a city grows beyond a certain size and starts building medium and high density housing.