> Self-driving software will fix this within a decade.

And it'll be powered by fusion energy!

> It's technically already legal to read books and watch TV in a car, if you own one particular high-end car model.

This isn't true. No car has reached level 5, which means that you're required to be able to take over. I'd really hope you're not doing this. If this is legal anywhere, those politicians are truly idiots.

> Cost of transportation is a whole another issue. Because then you need to include the local taxes that are used to build and maintain transportation infrastructure.

This one actually hurts a bit, because a very large percentage of road infrastructure is funded by federal taxes, which I'd really love to reduce, whereas a majority of public transportation is funded by local or state taxes. Another thing to note is that public transportation is partially funded by usage, whereas road infrastructure is not.

You need to include cost of transportation, because the cost of a car is extremely high, and this disproportionally affects the poor.

> I had to do a grocery run every day when I lived in a dense city. That's easily another 30-40 minutes wasted every day.

> Yes, and? Car also allows me to just do 2 trips a week to the store to get groceries for 4 people for several days.

The grocery store is just one example. You also need to fill your gas tank 1-2 times a week, wash the car, take it in for maintenance, etc. Every restaurant trip is a car ride, when you want to go to a bar, a car ride (or hopefully a taxi/lyft/uber). Thanks to density, I can walk to all of these things in ~10 minutes.

> The average bus load in the US is 16 people.

Again, using an average here isn't reasonable, especially when you're averaging across the US. You need to look at cities that have good public transportation that ubiquitous enough for use. NYC, and SF, for instance have considerably higher bus loads. When you look at train loads it's not even close to comparable.

See a comparison of the BART and the bay bridge, where the BART is 2x more efficient during rush hour: https://twitter.com/SFBART/status/1121516583409446912

The BART isn't even a great system to consider. The NYC subway's ridership is far higher.

> More roads/lanes almost always increase throughput.

No, they increase bandwidth. Throughput is how much is moved over a period of time. There's a lot of studies about this. See this article for just one example: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/us/widen-highways-traffic...

> But guess what, the transit speed is _slower_ than cars pretty much everywhere.

Not in cities with subway systems, or in cities where transit is prioritized over cars.

> Have you personally lived in Houston or another car-oriented city in the US?

I grew up in New Orleans (until around 30). I've lived in SF, NYC, and Tokyo. I've traveled lots of places. I have enough experience between both to know which is obviously superior in terms of general life quality.

Cities with sprawl are less fun. Commuting sucks (especially during commuter hours, where you get stuck in traffic). Parking sucks. Maintaining a car sucks. Paying the expense of cars sucks. Not being able to walk anywhere because cars are the priority sucks.

Walkable cities are more fun. There's a reason that people go to vacation to these places, and not places like houston.