My solution to noisy transit is to wear headphones.

I think the problem is more cultural conditioning, I've been riding transit for 25+ years, and I like taking transit to work. Others who haven't ridden transit don't understand why I'd ride a bus to work even though we get "free" parking.

On the way to work the bus is usually faster than driving (the bus takes the carpool lane), on the way home, traffic is bad enough that the bus is probably about the same speed as driving (maybe a bit longer since for one stop it needs to leave the freeway express lane so needs to cut through 4 lanes of traffic to get to the stop and then again to get back into the express lane), but I don't care since I'm usually reading.

The land use required to merely own cars is not great but it’s not the primary cause of sprawl in the US. There are plenty of examples that show car-oriented development with transit to a city center can work at up to 2000 people per km^2 and a typical American suburb has less than a fourth of that population density.

The traffic deaths can be reduced dramatically by reducing miles travelled and speed, but if we’re playing that game they also rank lower than infectious disease which spreads just fine on transit. Traffic deaths also are only a bit higher than suicide in America and lower than it in Europe; suicide is a crude example of the excess death burden of unhappiness, which ought to be considered.

And furthermore I’m not even convinced you’ve been on a crowded train. BART is almost never truly crowded. Trains in Wuhan are crowded. Crowded often means literally shoving your way in if you want to go anywhere. And the person I responded to claimed he thinks about the tollbox operator on a crowded train.

So yeah, dying in traffic on an ugly highway? Cool story bro.

Which Bay Area trains are you taking that are not crowded? Both BART and Caltrain are full during commute hours -- Caltrain express trains are usually standing room only (in rail cars that aren't well designed for standing passengers) and BART is running crush-loads out of Embarcadero in the evening.

The Caltrain local trains are usually less full but those all stop trains take forever to go any significant distance. (SF to RWC is about twice as long on a local as on a baby-bullet)

Indeed. And trains usually don't go from people's homes to their destination, so they typically cause traffic of some sort around train stations.

But even when they do, it's easier to handle traffic spread among dozens of stations spread out over 100 miles of track than to have all of those commuters drive to the city center.

Commuters don't all drive to the city center, they drive to 1000s of working places and arguably that's easier to handle traffic-wise than the traffic around fewer train stations (in one city!).

If businesses were spread out near major transit lines, that'd be another matter, but as it is now, the density is too low to serve well, transfers are a hard sell to commuters, no one wants to commute 40 minutes by train only to have to wait 15 minutes to transfer to a bus that takes another 15 minutes to get them to work.

VTA transit tries to serve a huge area with light rail, but everything is so spread out and there are so many stops that it takes forever, you can take light rail the 12 miles from downtown San Jose to Mountain View, but it'll take over an hour with 28 (!) stops in between. You could bike faster.