When traffic in a city is inherently bad. It sets the foundation for difficulty in solving the problem with buses (increase frequency, priority express buses)

In a high traffic situation, ETA gets adjusted from time to time. And buses will struggle to get in/out of stops and delays loom when accident occurs on the road.

Poor road planning and building alongside with massive amount of cars on the road is one of the major issue.

Maybe workplace hours should be adjusted as a whole or varying tolls based on high demand hours to avoid everyone competing for road space.

But I generally agree with the article that buses gets you really far. For a long time Singapore was relying on bus routes to move people around the city state, and progressively build subway lines as the demand and city planning go with it.