The urban trains are at best the "least bad" option. Even in NYC, which has a very extensive system of mass transit, taking mass transit is slow. For example, if I wanted to visit my friends in Brooklyn right now, mass transit would take an hour and 20 minutes (including about 20 minutes of walking, which isn't fun in bad weather). Driving would be twice as fast even when normal traffic is accounted for. Plus it would be door-to-door and much more comfortable.

I actually have a car but parking it near where I live would cost me $450 a month, so currently I'm leaving it with those friends in Brooklyn (for a fun 2-hour 40-minute round trip to pick it up and then drop it off again whenever I want to drive anywhere). I want a self-driving car because it could stay parked somewhere cheap, come to me, and then go back and park itself when I was done using it.

(I could take a taxi but that would be $65 right now, which is significantly more than 40 minutes of my time costs. I wonder how much of that price is simply taxes... NYC is deliberately making it harder to get around without using mass transit. Can you tell that I don't like living here?)