Any rational planning system would enhance public transport to mitigate the effects of curtailing widespread use of privately owned cars. However, you seem to be American so perhaps the notion of rational planning is alien to you. Certainly the use of verbiage like "stomping all over a person's right to own property and use it as they wish" would indicate that rational thought is alien to you.
In most towns, bus economics only allows for one hour routes and a transfer for most trips. That means two hours in motion average for a round trip, and up to two more hours waiting if your business does not line up with scheduled stops. The grandparent comment is exactly right.
Shorter, more frequent routes are possible, but making the economics work does require a ban on cars to convert drivers to paying transit riders. But most of the drivers still need cars to get to outlying areas, so they have to pay bus operations and car capital outlay. People woth modest incomes cannot afford both, so they would have to give up the car and be trapped in the denser part of the city, indeed having their personal liberties stomped on.
Autonomous taxis will rewrite the economic rules. Since they won't crash, the massive crumple zones and crush cage can be eliminated, dramatically reducing capital and operating costs. An autonomous taxi ride will likely cost less than driving your own beater.
Yours is the sole intelligent response, so I'll comment here.
> Autonomous taxis will rewrite the economic rules.
You're absolutely right.
However, that technology isn't here yet and there is no guarantee that it will arrive. Mind you, most of the barriers to adoption aren't even technical, although those exist too. I prefer not to count my chickens until they hatch.
Right now, public transportation means one thing: unions. And unions, in turn, mean: strikes, price hikes, inconsistent schedules and performance, etc.
On top of that, subway and other rail systems reach relatively few places. That means buses. And buses exacerbate the above issues to an even greater extent.
Self-driving vehicles work today and are legal in several states. Elementary pieces of self-driving tech are selling in production cars. I take it as a foregone conclusion that everything will be self-driving in 50 years—probably much sooner.
How about just a good and reasonably fast commuter-rail network? It's faster to get to many suburbs of Copenhagen by public transit than to drive, because we have: 1) extensive commuter rail; and 2) not many freeways.
I don't think it's only that American cities aren't actively discouraging driving (e.g. by banning cars from city centers), but that they are spending huge piles of money actively encouraging it, by building 10-lane freeways and the like. If you build rail and not freeways to all the suburbs, most people take rail for routine trips.
America is big. The population is very spread out. It is normal for an American city to have 1/20th the population density of Copenhagen. Commuter rail would just dump you in a sprawling suburn with no economically viable public transportation. Autonomous taxis will make it workable, but that is a decade or two in the future.
