It’s absolutely elitist to privilege a mode of transportation that requires upfront personal costs of tens of thousands of dollars, and running costs of hundreds of dollars on a daily basis, over modes of transportation that can be achieved for a few dollars a day...

/sarcasm

And that’s before we even look at the negative externalities of cars, around the tens of thousands of deaths caused directly in car accidents, the tens of billions of dollars of GDP wasted in people idling in cars during traffic, the many lives and billions of dollars in GDP due to worse health outcomes due to pollution, and the increasingly apparent climate change related costs.

Plenty of people get by with a $2000 used Toyota that might cost another $8/day in fuel, maintenance, and insurance. If mass transit is $5-6/day, that's not a crazy personal choice to make.

Even if that's the case, it isn't elitist to suggest we privilege cheaper modes of transport.

Your scenario cannot scale by definition (used)

Your scenario has no answer for the externalities.

Essentially, the only reason the scenario has any sort of standing is because it's based on the idea that commuting by personal vehicle is inherently better than public transport. Which is true for most of the US but is not true for most of the places which actually don't a priori assume personal vehicles are inherently significantly better for transport.

Are you suggesting not everyone drives a Tesla?

You're describing a great answer if we were designing the system from scratch. But, as many of us engineers know, dealing with legacy requirements can change the clearest path to a solution. I know very few people who correctly calculate the the cost of the externalities you listed against the convenience of having a car, yet their votes count for the same amount as ours.