It’s currently about 95F and humid every day where I live (mid-sized US city). I start sweating the moment I step outside. Add 10-15m worth of physical activity and I’m a disgusting smelly mess for the rest of the day. I hate that I live in a place that is car centric. But bike travel is not realistic here either even though most places I go to are easily within biking distance.
We have to collectively realize that the competition we’re up against is a private, quiet, climate controlled box with a built-in entertainment system that takes you directly from point A to point B reliably and on demand. Oh and a nationwide set of infrastructure built to accommodate it. People will absolutely pay a premium (both in $ and time sitting in traffic) as a trade off for those features. Additionally an enormous chunk of the market does not believe (or at least believe enough to care) that it matters for the climate. Environmentalism as a selling point for public/bike transit will never be effective on ~50% of the market.
The solution has to literally be better than cars in order to win. And cars have a lot going for them, to the point where most people have implicitly built their entire lives around the ubiquity of car availability. Transit advocates don’t seem to “get” this. We’re not asking people to change their mode of transit, we’re asking people to change their entire way of life for an alternative that they don’t believe (and may be right about) is better