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It's pretty hard to do good public transportation in a place like Houston. I've had forty-mile commutes in the past, and once you get that far out, you get that nasty superlinear expansion of area covered. The closest Houston could ever get is park-and-ride, i.e. re-locating the sea of asphalt, because buses are too dang slow. Not to mention walking is absolute misery due to weather from May to September.

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What the parent comment is saying doesn't disagree with this statement, but rather that this is self-inflicted by the chicken-and-egg nature of "we need more parking". The requirement for parking is what causes Houston to consider 40+ mile commutes normal, because the need for parking physically pushes uses further away from each other, making transit and walking less attractive, driving people into cars, and thus requiring ever more parking.

Forget about the distant places, Houston has a few dense places where transit can get decent ridership. Get rid of parking minimums and developers can turn some parking lots into a building increasing density and in turn making transit work better. Focus where you can win, let the rest be. Even if the city grows faster than the transport network, transit is still winning. Slow and steady can win this race of the time span of decades.

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