[BeetleB]

Yes, but Cornell lives in a small city.

Concrete example for my city. Going from the east end to the west end took over 2 hours. And most of it was on the rail system - so not competing with traffic. But it involved one transfer for the train, and another for the bus near the end of my destination.

Frequent stops - by both the train and the bus, as well as the stops, made it take a lot longer. In my case a car would have done it in about 40 minutes.