I took the bus for nearly a decade and I drive a car now. My life was greatly improved by having a car and while a car is more expensive technically, in indirect costs, it feels like a break even to me. At least as someone who buys cheap cars, tends to live within 30mins drive of my job and keeps them for a good long time. Even in a good public transit area in the US there is a significant time sink to using public transit for literally every aspect of your life. Getting to work is efficient and not significantly more time intensive than driving, but doing everything else like visiting a friend, going to a hair salon, get groceries can be a huge difference depending on what city you're in. I lived in a city where I was faster to take the bus to work than drive, but getting groceries was a harrowing 45mins journey. Places where getting to work took twice as long, but I could walk to the grocery store. In the US there's just no way to make public transit really work across all dimensions. Especially as we add in specificity. Like needing to bring home a large amount of items or visit humans instead of businesses. EU was much better about this just because of how mixed housing and businesses were.