There are numerous reasons. First is the pure revenue. The more people are reliant on the thing you provide, the more revenue you're going to generate.

Second, it limits freedom of movement and therefore independence by forcing the population to work within the confines of that freedom set about by Governemnt. If there is no other option affordable than public transport (how much are new electric cars again?) and you must work within the confines of that one transportation system, your choice and free will are limited by the confines offered by that system.

To put it into an everyday aspect, say you're the type of person that would leave work, head to the gym from work, then on the way home run by a supermarket to pick up some groceries. Depending on where you live, your journey time will potentially be 30 minutes - one hour by car all in. If you were put onto public transport and still wanted to achieve those same tasks, you can easily double or triple that journey time. That leaves you less time to yourself to engage in things that aren't profitable to a system of Government. I.e. makes you a wage slave.

Third, environmental factors. I'll hands down say in any position I have worked in where I was supposed to care about the environment and ecological sustainability of the world at large, better believe the company's bottom line finances mattered more. The less people there are on public transport, the less they can offset the related environmental factors of its use per capita of people using it. This makes them less attractive to the world when it comes to these back-patting summits. I wouldn't argue that one system of transport is more environmental than another, but heralding public transport as the only environmentally friendly method of transport is only dictated by the amount of people using it.

And finally is increasing control on harder to reach geographical locations. There is a long-lauded sentiment which is summed up with the "the idiocy of rural life". Where you have areas that public transport is either markedly less effective or plain inaccessible, you have minor but vibrant economies that are essentially self perpetuated and self reliant. This does not play well with overall Government control. And while that sounds very tin-foil hat, if the Government can't control it, they can neither subsidise nor tax it. With taxes, that increases revenue and thus reliance. With subsidies it's the same, except they're offsetting that future tax earning by some length of time (years, decades, it's irrelevant). Where I live, there is zero public transport. But there are plenty hive industries to do with vehicle repair, maintenance, almost everyone drives older cars that are very well maintained. The local council really stepped up its game recently in terms of parking controls and speed enforcement where none was either warranted nor needed. There has never been an issue in all the time that I have lived here where we couldn't easily park in town, do some errands and then drive home. Now in order to do so, despite the much higher than average council tax, it's £15 to do so for only a few hours. Their idea is to hurt the businesses in this area enough in order to get through the new large Tescos they want to open up nearby (which has already been defeated three times simply as they want to smack down huge swathes of forest land for it). By eliminating the local suppliers, their case for the large conglomerate is much stronger and by increasing parking charges, the number of traffic wardens and altering the speed limits on key roads from National Speed Limits (60mph) to 30mph and putting up speed cameras and camera vans (the roads in question have had zero accidents), they attempting to simply incorporate the small town and make us all willing, paying cogs in the machine. It's pretty awful what they are doing. The new bus route that came in last year is very ineffective. After they threw some bus stops around the place, nobody actually used the service at all. It's far too sketchy and the one time I attempted to use it, it turned a ten minute drive into a 40 minute journey one way and an hour hike back home when it became evident the buses had just sodded off for the day.

It's all part of the plan. By making driving impractical, it forces people onto their system of transport which they dictate to their advantage. That's the simple maths of it all.