Nobody is going to care about transit unless it's for everybody and not just for the poor. Also, oftentimes the best way to make transit better is to divert resources away from individual automotive transport. A dedicated bus lane means fewer lanes for cars. Wide sidewalks mean fewer lanes for cars. For streetcars and light rail to be effective alternatives to driving they have to be grade-separted, and that means fewer lanes for cars. Money that could be spent widening a freeway could instead be built constructing a subway.

Cars are also a classic example of socializing losses and privatizing gains. Taxpayers build and maintain the roads, air pollution and carbon emissions affect the global climate, and pedestrians and cyclists are driven out of public space in fear for their lives, but at least you can get point-to-point between your house and Wal-Mart. There are ways in which driving will always be "better" for the individual driver, but only in a fundamentally selfish and antisocial way.

>A dedicated bus lane means fewer lanes for cars

>For streetcars and light rail to be effective alternatives to driving they have to be grade-separted, and that means fewer lanes for cars.

Yes, and setting dedicated right-of-way for public transit makes it faster, which should compensate for at least some of the reduced drivability in the overall navigability of the city. I think this counts as making transit better first (or at least at the same time).

Chicago's transit system is top five because the rest of North American is terrible - not because it's a wonderful system. It's designed to move people between one central work district (the loop) and their neighborhood or suburb. That's it. It can't be compared to systems like NYC, London, Paris, Barcelona etc. To be fair, Chicago, while populous, only has a few neighborhoods that match the density of those cities, making light urban rail in particular much less feasible.

When I lived carless in Chicago (2001 - 2006) it was only possible if you were childless and lived in a small number of densely populated north side neighborhoods (which does not include Hyde Park). Interestingly, the car sharing services are changing this — cabs generally avoided anything but same wealthy, dense neighborhoods. Uber and Lyft serve much more broadly. Anecdotally, in my neighborhood, the number of cars with a Lyft or Uber sign is astronomical - I once counted traffic for 30 minutes and 43% of vehicles that passed my residence had a car sharing sign in the window.

Between long-haul, low-friction car hiring services (Zipcar) and short-trip, low-friction car hiring services (Uber, Lyft) I think carless urban life in Chicago is vastly extended to everyone with a good paycheck and no children.

I spent a week in Berlin recently. The transit system is so good I had no desire to use a car, and I traveled around the city to see the sights.

And it should be noted that Berlin is ridiculed in Germany for its horribly broken S-Bahn service. A few years ago, the Federal Railway Authority had to lay up about 3/4 of their trains because they were vastly underserviced. The operator then truncated many of the lines to have enough rolling stock available for servicing the remaining parts. These changes persist until today. (For example, I remember when the S3 used to run until Westkreuz.)

Unless you're trying to go somewhere important like say TXL airport. Sorry! That'll take an hour since you have to go train to train to bus!

TXL is a really quick bus trip from Jakob-Kaiser-Platz (U7). It's SXF where the bus takes forever.

Eventually this will be solved when the new airport opens along with its own S-Bahn station. Any year now...

SXF also has it's own S-Bahn station.