Minus air pollutuon, I’m not convinced. With air pollution cars are obviously way worse. For commuting your point stands: I prefer current trains to Bay Area traffic because they’re not crowded. But for everything else the car wins by a mile.

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.