> Today, in 2019, I drive a car that generates absolutely no pollution,

Break and tire dust are still environmental pollutants.

There is also a one time environmental cost to manufacture your car.

And when it comes to affordable housing, car infrastructure makes it very hard. Underground parking stalls in a major urban city can cost up to $30k each to build! And above ground parking lots in cities take up land that could be used for housing.

Not to mention wider streets are needed for cars, that is space that could be used for more housing and more commercial activity. If you visit the dense parts of London or Tokyo that are served by mass transit, you can see how smaller streets closer together leads to more livable cities.

> Now you should take a tram or bus, wait 80% longer on every trip

Depends on how well built out the infrastructure is. In cities with top tier public transit, subway cars are coming every 3 - 4 minutes, traveling underground, avoiding all traffic.

My car shows me the average speed of my trips. If I am driving through a city, I am lucky to average out 20mph. During bad traffic I can easily be at 10 or 12mph.

Mass transit doesn't have that problem. An underground line is always going to travel at the same speed. During rush hour it may be more cramped, but the travel time isn't any greater, unless the subway is full and you have to take the next one. Which comes in three minutes. Which is less time than I have waited at a single stoplight to make a left turn!

Newer cities have horrible designs. They streets are too wide, so there is less land, and housing costs more. They often have laws on the books about minimum parking requirements, so housing costs more to construct. They have requirements about parking for commercial businesses, so more of the city is devoted to places to park than actual business!

Strip malls are the worst possible example of this!

And if you start building low enough density, cities actually start losing money. Property taxes on parking lots are next to nothing, especially if they are free parking for businesses. But the city still has to run infrastructure to those parking lots, pay for maintenance on the surrounding streets, and pay for all the externalities of having more cars on the roads.

> They have less options on where to live, less options on where to shop, less options on where to send children to school, less options to simply consume less and spend less on anything at all).

If I can hop on a subway and get anywhere in a city in 30 minutes, I now have more choices of where to live! More choices of where to shop! As for schooling, look at Tokyo, where children regularly take the subway to school.

In a city without mass transit, if I am in one part of the city and I want to go to a shop in another, I have to decide if I really want to suffer through:

1. Walking back to my car
2. Navigating through traffic to my next destination
3. Finding parking there (possibly paying, and hoping there is parking!)
4. Walking from parking to my destination
5. Getting back to my car
6. Driving through more traffic to get home, or to my next destination

It sucks. In contrast, even a city like Boston with good but not great public transit[1], when I'm visiting Boston and some friends call me up and ask if I want to go see a movie, so long as the theater is on a transit line, the answer is sure! In a city without transit I have to worry about if I can get there given traffic at that time of day, in a city with mass transit, I know I can go.

[1] Compared to Seattle, Boston has great public transit, but whenever I talk to anyone from Boston they complain about it, so I'll avoid calling it "great" even though from my perspective I love using it when I'm there!