I disagree. In Switzerland they have some of the best public transport in the world and I still tend to chose car fairly often. Public transport has the advantage that you can do something (e.g. watch movies, read books, etc.) while traveling while in a car that time is thrown in the trash.
But the problem is that public transport goes near where lots of people want to go but doesn't go where any person actually wants to go. This means further traveling time after the public transport bit is finished. And probably connections as well. This means, for me, that public transport takes about twice as long to get anywhere.
In my opinion the future is robot controlled cars. All the benefit of public transport with none of the inefficiencies, etc. Public transport is just an intermediate step.
The best thing about public transport in cities is that you don't need parking space. Hunting for parking space can easily take more time than you save by getting directly to your destination, and public parking can be quite expensive.
That said, many offices have reserved parking, which fixes this - though that real estate is valuable.
Well if my idea comes to fruition the automatic car service would only need parking for "overflow" cars when not in use. Some percentage of the system would always be in use so the cars would only not be in use when they were being repaired/upgraded/whatever.
