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High-throughput transit isn't there to be better in 1:1 comparison with one person's car trip, but to make better cities possible.

If you only imagine this as a static scenario where everything is the same except you swap car for a train, of course car looks better.

The problem is you're not in a single-player game full of NPCs. When everyone else also chooses the car, you physically run out of space for everyone's cars, and end up with a city full of asphalt and large roads that are dangerous/inconvenient to cross and unpleasant to be around.

Car infrastructure takes a lot of space. When it can be reduced, it allows building amenities closer together, so you can have multiple useful destinations within walking distances not much worse than crossing a Walmart parking lot, and you get an environment that's nicer than a parking lot.

Being crammed in a train that moves 3 million people a day is the price to pay for not having a sea of asphalt for ~3 million cars.

> end up with a city full of asphalt and large roads that are dangerous/inconvenient to cross and unpleasant to be around.

And all the associated pollution, overheating and flooding issues that go along with it

People very much prefer sedentary lifestyle too, yet is very bad for your health. Likewise, cars are nice as long as you continue to ignore all the negative externalities it has - pollution, climate change and above all the massive waste of space in parking lots and highways that could be used better.

> rather than spend potentially far more time navigating a crowded subway system.

That isn't how it should be. A good subway system is faster than your car for the trips you normally make, and it comes so often you don't think about waiting. There are very few good subways in the world, (much less the US), and so people think it needs to be bad because that is all they see - but it need not be that way.

> They pick their mode of transportation based on their needs and priorities.

Transit isn’t a free market. The federal, state and local governments in the US heavily, heavily subsidize car transit to the exclusion of every other alternative. If consumers paid the fully-burdened cost, cars would be much less popular.

> If these conditions aren’t met then you need additional transport to and from one or both ends of the subway journey.

They’re called buses, street cars, ride-shares, bicycles, etc. This has been a solved problem for about a century.

> There are cities where I’m just not going to take my kids on the subway if I can avoid it.

Interested to see any statistics showing which subway system is less safe than a car in the same area per passenger per mile traveled.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-public-transit...

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