[abecedarius]

Outside of NYC, in the U.S. public transit in my experience takes two or three times as long to get you where you're going. Until the typical experience gets better or people get poorer, the resource efficiency won't matter.

[larkery]

I guess part of the issue here is that cars are a kind of coordination problem - if nobody else is using a car on the roads, cars are quite a good choice. They are fast and easy, and go where you want.

However, each person who uses a car creates some external costs (a high traffic factor / unit of person-flow) which are borne by all the other road users. Once people choosing the "defect" strategy (cars) have enough numbers, the "cooperate" strategy (not cars) gets broken for other solutions that use the road network, so the system fails to a bad equilibrium if there are enough defectors in the population.

[abecedarius]

Congestion pricing would solve that, and go nicely with robocars too.

(I'm not a fan of cars; I don't drive one myself. But I don't expect people to accept any less convenient and flexible solution.)

[StudentStuff]

The common American is getting poorer, but just like junk food and lack of exercise, people still drive. Other modes of transit may be much safer and healthier, but unless the common person is encouraged (whether that be with incentives to not drive, or tolls for driving) quite a few people will still drive.

There are a number of US cities that get most workers into the urban core besides NYC despite poor to middling infrastructure at best, but driving infrastructure dwarfs everything else, bike lanes are added only to diet roads usually (resulting in shitty lanes), and most areas see 60% to 70% of their land tied up in (mostly empty) parking, which is a disaster for every mode of transport.