I just experimented on Google Maps with an arbitrary route: random place near Microsoft campus to a random nice park in Seattle: 1hr30 minutes.

Car: 23 minutes. Even during the awful 520 rush hour, it's still ~15-30min faster.

> in/out of the city becomes a lot easier for more people than it becomes worse for

Pretty hard to imagine losing 2hrs on a round-trip into the city is a benefit for anyone that can't afford to live in the city proper.

You've managed to choose an arbitrary route that is an extremely uncommon commute and one of the worst possible commutes into the city. You're also neglecting time to find parking and the cost to park (and as long as we're mentioning costs, gas, insurance, and wear and tear on the car).

Fair enough, but I take measurements like these as a need to further improve transit. For example, the light rail reaching Redmond should help that particular route a lot.

In general, it doesn't make sense to invest in making it easier for cars as the population grows — it's not as sustainable as improving transit, since public transit is a far more efficient way to transport people.

That estimation may change in the coming decades. Self driving cars would allow for pooling and far greater car throughput on existing roads (no human latency/error, synchronized top speeds)

Even if self-driving cars were perfect and every manufacturer came out with one tomorrow, it would still be 20 or 30 years before the existing cars on the road were all replaced. To say nothing of the decades of R&D that will be required starting now in order to get us to that point.

I think it's naive to suggest this as an alternative when we could have working mass transit systems using proven equipment within a decade. Why would we wait for what might come when we could have something better today?

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Nah, it's literally one express freeway bus. That's what's so great about Seattle public transit.

Hmm? 545 from Overlake or the Redmond Transit Center? I’m not sure what would necessitate a stop in Bellevue.