I agree with your car point.

The problem is we current have three choices:

- Cars

- "Company Store"-style housing (e.g. get fired, get made homeless)

- Good public transport.

The third option is obviously the best but it is outside of any single company's control. To get good quality public transport the entire city (or cities) need to be onboard, invest sometimes billions of dollars, and likely run it at a near loss (since most public transport systems lose money).

If someone knows of an alternative not listed above, I'd like to read about it. And, no, automated vehicles aren't an alternative because they don't actually exist in production yet.