Try saying that when your commute involves spending an hour in rush hour going a single kilometer that a subway does in five minutes. Your situation isn’t an argument against public transit, but for making decent public transit. Of course you’re going to chose a car if there’s no good public transit where you live. But what if there’s a bus terminal five minute walk from where you live, or a subway station in ten minutes by bike with parking, and the rest of the trip takes half as long as it does by car, at a fraction of the yearly cost (gas, insurance, maintenance, licensing), and you can even sleep on the trip because you’re not the one driving. Not to mention never having to worry about finding parking near your destination if you’re not paying for a dedicated spot.

This is the reality for those of us who are able to use transit on a regular basis, and we only pay like 15 minutes a day from our wages for this service, not a week’s worth every month to own a car. It’s even better in the EU, like in Germany or Spain, since high speed rail means that you can go pretty much anywhere you want, even on vacation, without a car. And for cheap. One guy ran the numbers, and for 10% the cost of owning a car, he was able to get a yearly pass for both high speed rail and city transit in two different cities for the cost of owning and operating a car for a year.