The desirability of transit is not because people love taking the subway, it's because cars as the main form of transport do not scale well with city size.

Anecdotal example: when we lived in Tel Aviv (bad transit, although probably not as bad as many places in the US) I had several jobs and it would take me 50-60 minutes to get from home to work or vice versa.

This was not just me but is usual in greater Tel Aviv, unless you can afford to live in the city (almost nobody with kids does, metro tel aviv has 3.7m residents vs 450k for the city itself).

We've lived in Vienna before we moved and moved to Berlin after, both cities with great transit (that sometimes smell like piss). Both metros are comparable in size to TLV (metro Vienna 2.6m, metro Berlin 4.5m) and I've had several jobs in either - it usually takes 30-40 minutes to get to work and again it's not just me but the common case.

There is public transportation and hopefully it's on the way to getting better. I personally take the bus to work everyday. Cap Metro is adding bus routes on the mopac express lanes from RR to downtown Austin.

The problem is there is a culture of driving in Austin and not of taking the public options. Most people don't even know what is out there. We could do with quite a few less cars on the road.

Since pay is high in the bay area, I have a couple of nice cars.

Thankfully the climate is outstanding so I don't even need A/C.

Sounds like you'd have a lot of traffic then....

...which we do. Getting into Austin from one of the suburbs is a nightmare during rush hour and still a slow 'stop-and-go' at all other times.