I agree that rail still wins on the capacity front by far. I was just pointing out that self driving cars should offer some improvements over the current state of traffic.

I don't think that walking for 30 minutes is "no issue". Of course at airports you have to walk 30 minutes because those are a special case, and you have no other option. Also, trips to/from the airport do not make up a large portion of the average person's trips.

A better and more common example would be going to a friend's house or grocery store. Compare:

Home>self driving car>destination

Home>bus>train>bus>destination (with likely higher amounts of walking between each)

Admittedly the car performs much worse our traffic score, but cars are essentially point-to-point which I think is a huge advantage. Additional advantages include privacy and cargo space.

Like it or not, our built environment has been made for cars. Metros still offer value for high density areas, but for the huge number of Americans that live in suburbs/exurbs, self-driving cars are the answer.

I am not arguing the car isn't supremely convenient. Even in Tokyo, drop two arbitrary point A or B about 5 miles as the crow flies apart and the car will win 9/10. That is beside the point. I am arguing against the idea that transit usage is impossible. Virtually everywhere that people take transit en masse, the car is faster. Seemingly there is some culturally learned impatience surrounding transit that is deep rooted in north american culture, to the point where the idea of taking a little extra time is an outright impossibility to most people. This is a highly individual culture where tragedy of the commons externalities are handwaved away in favor of a supremely convenient individual experience, as the climate of the earth is more damned by the year.