Now, when people advocate for public transit carrots, those carrots have to compete with a century of driving carrots and the momentum that this status quo has.
I lived in northern virginia for a while, literally 100 feet away from a stop on one of the best public transit systems in the US. inside DC sure, the metro was about as fast as an uber, or even faster for some routes / times of day. but starting from across the river, it often took twice as long by metro. I honestly don't see how they could make transit better than uber without running trains so often as to negate the efficiency advantage of bulk transport.
as an engineer, it kinda seems like people are expecting the latency of a synchronous request/reply service, but combined with the throughput of a batch job. surprise! you can't (usually) have both.
imo both point-to-point and mass transit have their place. but people are always going to prefer point-to-point when it's economic for them. congestion pricing seems like a reasonable way to preserve the low latency characteristics of point-to-point, while nudging people to use the batch job when it's sufficient for their needs.