The biggest advantage with public transit is that your mind is not engaged driving. But at some point, the speed advantage is overwhelming. And eventually the price advantage dominates. Taking my family and grandparents to the airport is $40 by car^W rideshare and $45 by BART and twice the amount of time for me: I live upstairs from a T-train / Caltrain stop. I'd invite anyone to price out the difference themselves.

Inside San Francisco, using public transit except for directly between BART stops is incredibly slow. For almost all journeys e-bikes dominate the speed discussion, and cars are second. The biggest constraint for us that made us take public transit is that our child was too young for a bike and we'd still only take it to Union Square.

I spent over a decade on a bicycle plus Muni/BART Fastpass and it's pretty good for the price if you're single and stay inside the city. As such a person I could crack open a book and a 15 min from Glen Park to Montgomery St. was the same as a 1 h from Montgomery to El Cerrito (the latter even preferable).

But the various policy choices popular in San Francisco (intentionally high labour usage, ill and violent people in public spaces, low cleaning capacity) do act against transit being a good choice. By comparison, I have family in Vancouver, BC where the politics are similar but the policy is different and the trains run very often and are fast (these are the most important things - made possible by removing labor from the equation) and are relatively clean. People will offer you a seat when you hop on with your stroller, elevators are functional and relatively clean, and it's overall a lot more usable as a family.

Can you explain your math behind "$40 by car"?

Bart seems much more cleaner and safer now than in years past. I don't know if free mental space is the main benefit of transit. During rush hour, you can't do much outside of listen to something, which you can do while driving too.

Not having to deal with parking and the fact that driving is actually very dangerous seem like stronger points in transits favor.

Fwiw, driving also has some negative je ne sais quoi for me that goes beyond the functional advantages. Maybe it's the aesthetic onslaught of ugly concrete, noise, heat and smell of sitting in traffic for an hour on the highway. Maybe there's something about getting around on your feet that makes me feel viscerally connected to the city. Maybe it's just the exercise that compounds over time. But I hate driving.