I've been seeing this one a lot lately so I'm going to go ahead and call it. Bullshit. Most people directly exchange time for money in the course of "making a living". This is why poverty is referred to as a trap (and a desperate one at that). Poverty is what happens at the limit of this exchange when it takes an extraordinary amount of time to to get very little (or goods worth very little) money.

Instead of people "wasting their lives", what we see in this example is a broken economic system that makes it more valuable for people to sit in their cars two hours a week while the street is cleaned than the other available alternatives. This should open the debate about the failures of public transport or city planning or whatever, not merely provide a smug fellow on a bike an opportunity to look down his nose at others.