Accordingly, the taxi costs significantly more than a bus.
I’ll happily take a bus or rail for commuting where I know what to expect for service reliability and connection times.
If I’m doing a one off trip it’ll be a hired car.
Now, I walk 5 mins to a bus to the train station, another 5 mins to my train, wait 5 minutes, then enjoy the half-hour ride (while reading a book) to the next train station, and finally hop on a bus that takes me 5 minutes from work. Total commute time: 45 + 15 minutes walk.
By car: 70-90 minutes.
Why? The train goes 180 km/h while cars only go 120, and there is usually a traffic jam during rush hour.
If you put bus stops where people actually live and work, you can get pretty good coverage.
Jarrett Walker over at humantransit has written extensively about this.
https://humantransit.org/2010/02/the-power-and-pleasure-of-g...
And on LA in particular: https://humantransit.org/2010/03/los-angeles-the-transit-met...