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In 4 of your 5 examples (not TWAW, where the benefit is concentrated on trans women), both the benefits and the costs of the policy are small and distributed. The result is that in debates on most of these issues, normies end up ignoring diffuse costs and benefits and arguing purely from aesthetics.
Going through point by point:
The pro-alcohol argument is about the small benefits to a large number of responsible drinkers. The anti-alcohol argument is about the ex ante small costs to a large number of potential victims of irresponsible drinkers (obviously ex post the cost to the people who are killed by drunk drivers are not small, but the traditional public choice argument for why diffuse costs are ignored works ex ante). Absent media amplification of rare negative events, the that-which-is-seen bias works in favour of the drinkers. Media amplification of drink-driving deaths creates a that-which-is-seen bias in favour of the prigs. For an example of how effective this amplification is, consider figure 5 in this report (the report is by a prig lobby group, but I am co. paring costs to costs so the bias shouldn't matter). According to the anti-alcohol lobby, <5% of the negative externalities of alcohol use in the UK are due to drink-driving. (Most of them are due to drunken crime, including domestic violence). But drink-driving takes up a lot more than 5% of the public debate.
Road building is a typical example of a policy with somewhat concentrated benefits (to the people who use the new road, and to the politicians who cut the ribbon) and diffuse costs (to taxpayers) - the induced demand argument (which I agree is stupid in the way it is normally made, but there is a steelman which is worth taking seriously) is an argument that the concentrated benefits will be smaller than predicted.
The benefit of keeping poors out of middle-class neighborhoods through snob zoning is diffuse, but the metro-area-level costs of not building enough housing when every neighborhood is snob zoned are even more diffuse - this is why the NIMBYs have been winning for 50+ years and only started losing when metro-level housing shortages got bad enough to affect the PMC.
The point of a road diet is to benefit non-drivers at the expense of drivers. If the road diet is sane (and I am aware that sometimes insane road diets happen because people support them for aesthetic reasons rather than because any identifiable human being benefits), then both of these groups are actually quite concentrated. A good road diet increases the throughput of human beings going where they want to go because an inefficient use of street space is replaced by a more efficient one.
This is of course a functionally equivalent statement to "good policies have benefits that outweigh the harms". Yes, that's the definition. But that presumes the people who are making the policies are competent and well-meaning, and they never seem to be even one. I would expect a 'road diet' (especially when explicitly named so) to be done by politicians who are at best following a fad, at worst intending to hurt people they think are their enemies.
In the city where I live they banned bicycles out of the (old medieval) city center. Technically cars too, but already nobody drove there (who in their right mind would even try). But the American Democrats are hampering transport so we should also hamper transport, it's cargo cult blue-tribe-ism. To top it all of, official taxis can still go in. So the local hoity-toities can still be ferried to and from their subsidized cultural events in style. To their credit (?) I haven't seen much actual enforcement.
Can you provide some context on the bicycle ban? What is their stated reasoning? For example, I could understand such a ban based on a lack of space, because a mediaeval city centre probably has narrow streets, but this can't be the case given the taxis.
They 'pedestrianized' the area. It's been a few years, I don't recall any reason being given apart from the usual platitudes about safety and livability. The place does get thronged on the weekends - or did, prior to the Covid lockdowns bankrupting half the shops.
Official taxis being exempt is a citywide thing, they also get to go on bus lanes, and it's been that way since forever.
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