A bill pending on Beacon Hill that looks to set a statewide vehicle miles traveled reduction goal as part of the decarbonization push has ignited national backlash, with critics calling it governmental overreach.

Under the so-called Freedom to Move Act, an interagency coordinating council would be tasked with crafting a “whole-of-government plan” to reduce reliance on personal vehicles and increase access to public transportation in the Bay State.

“The legislation would ensure that Massachusetts stays on track to reduce emissions from transportation – the sector that accounts for the greatest share of emissions in the Commonwealth,” according to a bill summary.

Senate Majority Leader Cindy Creem, a Newton Democrat, is leading the push to shift the Bay State away from relying “too heavily” on electric vehicles as a “decarbonizing strategy.”

“With the Trump administration rolling back vehicle emission standards and withholding funds from EV charging programs,” Creem said during a legislative hearing in mid-May, “and with congressional Republicans looking to repeal EV tax credits and derail state-level EV rules, now is the time to pursue new strategies, additional strategies.”

“Setting specific goals for reducing vehicle miles traveled would help guide decisions made across state government,” she added, “and sharpen the focus of efforts to promote alternative modes of transportation like public transit, biking, walking.”

A clip of Creem’s tesimony has gone viral in the weeks following the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy’s hearing on May 14.

Last week, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones posted about the bill on X, which was subsequently removed from the social media platform. Fox News’ ‘The Faulkner Focus’ also featured it in a segment titled “Democrats divided over how to move forward,” last Tuesday.

In the segment, anchor Harris Faulkner interviewed conservative political commentator Michael Knowles, who noted a survey that MassInc conducted last year showing that 70% of respondents “felt unsafe on public transit in the Greater Boston area.”

“People want to be safe,” Knowles said. “You need to give people some kind of option to vote for you. As Democrats are struggling with being viewed as so out of touch, I don’t think this lady in Massachusetts is going to help.”

State Rep. Mike Connolly, a Cambridge Democrat, is one of the bill’s eight co-sponsors. He told the Herald on Saturday that he believes the way the bill is being portrayed is “completely overblown and ignorant.”

“This legislation doesn’t attempt to set some specific limit or establish any kind of prescriptive formula to punish individual drivers, as the right-wing reporting on this seemed to imply,” Connolly said. “All it really does is say that we should put the structures in place to consider and refine our policies around vehicle miles traveled.”

The bill’s summary states that MassDOT’s transportation plans must “provide a reasonable pathway to compliance with our emissions limits for the transportation sector.” If those reductions aren’t met, the agency would have to make a “greater investment in public transit, bike and pedestrian infrastructure, or other clean transportation options.”

Regional planning organizations and MassDOT would also be required to approve only projects with “a reasonable pathway to compliance with the greenhouse gas emissions sublimits … and the statewide vehicle miles traveled reduction goals.”

Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, a watchdog group, thrust the bill into the national spotlight, with a May 23 post garnering nearly 350,000 views on X and being multiplied further by prominent conservative accounts.

Organization spokesman Paul Diego Craney says the legislation would be “incredibly damaging to the state economy and restrict transportation for countless residents.”

“Massachusetts lawmakers need to reverse course on the state’s mandate to hit net-zero by 2050,” Craney told the Herald on Saturday, “which is driving these lawmakers to propose some extreme pieces of legislation … Net-zero is nothing more than a fantasy.”

The interagency coordinating council would be created through the legislation, consisting of 15 state officials.

The group would assess and report on strategies “necessary to reduce statewide vehicles miles traveled through the establishment of an equitable, interconnected, accessible and reliable network of non-personal vehicle transportation options and through land use policies that reduce the need for personal vehicles,” according to the bill.

Sen. Michael Barrett, a Lexington Democrat who chairs the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy, has raised concerns that the bill may not be practical in all parts of the Commonwealth.

“I do worry about an unintended and subtle bias against rural Massachusetts,” Barrett said at the hearing on the bill. He added it raises the “question of what someone is to do in a place where one has to travel a long distance” to work.

A statewide coalition of environmental organizations reported last December that transportation represents “37% of total emissions statewide, and it is one of the sectors where we have made the least progress toward our statutory Clean Energy and Climate Plan goals.”

One of the targets in that plan is for there to be “200,000 zero-emission vehicles on the road by 2025,” but the Bay State was “below half that total” at end of last year, according to the coalition.

State data shows that “light-duty vehicles” traveled 57,191 million miles in 2023, a figure projected to grow to “about 59,100 million in 2030.”

Seth Gadbois, a clean transportation staff attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation, highlighted that the bill is based on laws in Minnesota and Colorado, which redirected funding away from highway projects towards bus corridors.

Massachusetts’ clean energy and climate plan lacks “clear, measurable guidelines or targets” to reduce miles driven, Gadbois said at the legislative hearing.

“This absence leads to disparate and uncoordinated efforts to give people more options for how to get around,” he said, “all while miles driven by car and emissions continue to increase year over year.”

New Bedford resident Elijah DeSousa, founder of the energy advocacy group Citizens Against Eversource, told the Herald on Saturday that he believes the bill is not “just another climate proposal,” but a “blueprint for behavioral control disguised as environmental policy.”

“I refuse to quietly surrender the most fundamental right we have as citizens: the right to move freely, without needing permission from unelected councils or state-issued metrics,” he said.

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