so what's the alternative? build houses right on top of factories? pact stile mass transit with strict workerfactory allocation?
there's zero chance mass transit can accommodate people's needs, even if you somehow solve the shopping issue with local markets and fixed item prices, the jobhouse graph will always look like a fractal set of overlapping stars.
cars is one of the most important social equalizer of this and last century. it allows people from basically all social status to move themselves, their family and their belongings at any time in full autonomy, enabling them to find houses and jobs in the most economical and convenient places.
private cars win over public transit because it's a better product. the only way for public transit to compete is to mandate laws to make cars comparatively a worse product, which is fundamentally anticompetitive - once public transit become monopolistic, once the company owns a tract, they can abuse their position deciding pricing and timetables.
even in traffic, private cars offer a better experience: people are in their own space, under a roof from start to finish, with their preferred temperature and away from both obnoxious or influenced people.
forcing mass transit trough legislation will surely have some short term benefits, but also:
- more class divide between the richs, that will always be able to afford a car, and the poors who won't
- massive gentrification of well connected areas, while the poors get pushed out to where service is of less quality
- dependency of the poors to expensive third party services on any occasion they need to move themselves or their goods across a non serviced destination. rentals is not an option: rentals need a credit card, and guess who don't own one?
- dependency on public transit times. have an unusual work shift or need to visit parents? get prepared to wait in the open under the cold or rain. need to get your child out of school in a down hour because he's suddenly ill? too bad, transit only gives peak service at peak hours.
of course there's situation where mass transit gets convenient, like large cities where a significant percentage of the population shares the same source/destination points, at which point people will use it naturally on their own.
opposing private transit is going to destroy an important achievement of modern society, the car has been a great economical equalizer and still is. market, after all, need customer flexibility not to be captured. pollution is something to be solved with more efficient cars and better technology all around.
it'd be like discovering tomorrow that soap pollutes: some will want to force everyone to smell, some will create a better soap.