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This seems like a reasonably fair summary to me.
While I find many of the Urbanist arguments appealing — and have at times commuted by transit, bike, and foot — for me there are two big weaknesses. First, that we should prioritize possible efficiencies at full capacity over observed performance. Second, is the strength of irreversibly of the situation. It seems quite possible that pure car-oriented and pure transit-oriented transportation are relative equilibrium states, but the transition state is not equilibrium.
I think the two objections are related. Ranking trains over cars in efficiency in long-term thinking requires some optimism about actual ridership. If ridership is expected to remain low over the long term in the US, it is by definition not short-term thinking to deprioritize it.
If all that has to be done to make transit superior is (1) Convince people to abandon existing driving infrastructure. (2) Figure out how to contain the high costs of projects in the US. (3) Improve the strength of our institutions and management (4) Move forward transit spending to update all outdated systems. Then there is NOT a small potential barrier to cross from the O’Toole analysis world to the idealist Urbanist paradise world.
Three small side notes to round things out. I generally thought the DC metro system was one of the more pleasant metro experiences in the US, but even that wasn't free from people involved seemingly actively trying to make it worse (sorry for the source but you can check the twitter thread if you're skeptical of the slant). I also can't say there were never uncomfortable situations on the DC metro. Second, it is fair to consider the impact of transit on infectious disease. Some transit analyses try to discount the recent drop in ridership, but unless you think there will never be another infectious disease again it seems silly to call for relying on a transportation method that will either not be there when you need it or be a vector for the disease to spread. Third, I'm unwilling to defend minimum parking requirements, but in terms of reveled preference I do think it's quite possible American really do prefer car-centric neighborhoods. And those that do rightfully bear (at least part) of the cost of the preference.
For the old and disabled, a system with zero cars clearly doesn't work. Those too old/disabled to use transit probably (although not always) shouldn't be driving their own cars either, so taxis of some kind are needed. Paratransit does exist in some places, and it's really bad (as in, 2-4 hours extra waiting/travel time over using a car); as that Wikipedia article mentions, some places are subsidizing taxis (sorry, "ride-hailing services") instead which makes sense (assuming you've worked out the issues of whether your old users can use a smartphone needed to access ride-hailing services).
While I'm very pro-transit, there are definitely edge cases where cars are necessary, so literally zero cars is not a reasonable goal, and any pro-transit person arguing for such is either confused or being misunderstood.
Rereading your comment, I see
Trying to discourage car usage in an area so not-dense that people can't walk to a grocery store is nonsense. No one would ever take transit to do their grocery shopping if they had another option (except for maybe occasional trips of a specialty store of some kind); that sounds awful. Work on improving density first.
Urbanists may want to discourage people from living in single-family-home suburbs in favor of denser areas; they certainly don't want to leave suburbs exactly as they are except deleting all the cars and putting in buses and trains.
Okay, but:
Given that we lack the raw materials to replace ICE cars with electric cars, I think they sort of are. They can't make riding the LA public transportation system attractive. But they can effectively ban most private ownership of vehicles. Degrading quality of life of people in the suburbs is surprisingly popular among some political factions.
I've been hearing "the new emissions standards are impossible to achieve affordably" all my life. Somehow they always manage to figure it out, either by changing the cars or changing the standards.
Are new cars not less affordable now? I mean a new car in 2022 averaged $48,080. A new car in 1980 was something like $8,025 or $23,920 in inflation adjusted dollars. Part of this is consumer behavior and non-emissions or efficiency improvements. "CPI: New Vehicles" already "corrects" for quality improvements including emissions or efficiency improvements, so shouldn't be used to compare affordability.
There's no reason to buy a cheap new car today, you can buy a used car instead.
My wife, my parents, my sister, my brother in law, and myself all make six figures. The newest car in the group is a 2018. The average is roughly 2013. And I don't feel deprived in any way.
Cars used to break down at 100k miles. And features used to vastly improve every ten years. Now we all drive ten year old cars and they have Bluetooth and abs and airbags.
When I was car shopping last year, this was very much not the case, due to the supply chain issues. We ended up buying new and waiting several months, despite preferring something a bit older and less expensive, because used cars cost about the same as new ones. Some used cars cost more than used ones last summer, because there wasn't a waiting list.
The situation may have started to clear up by now, though.
This is true precisely because of my point: used cars today are about as good as new cars. This was simply not true twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. There used to be some really shitty cars on the market. Growing up the used cars were stuff like the Neon, the Cavalier, the first gen Ford Exploder, the Jeep Cherokee. Of course, being middle aged now, I'm growing nostalgic for some of those cars, but they were real junk in a lot of ways. Used to be that bottom end old cars got to 60 in "eventually;" had self changing oil by 80k, were junk or Ships of Theseus by 150k, were pigs on gas if they were larger than a Focus, were loud and uncomfortable and ugly. As a result they lost value quickly as better, faster, prettier cars came on the market. Sports cars went through such a revolution between 1995 and 2012 or so that every five years cars were noticeably faster and better handling.
Today that simply isn't the case. Even mom-mobiles are generally fast enough that the limitation is the driver's willingness to press down on the gas moreso than the car's capability to hit higher speeds. Most of the creature comforts like heated seats, ABS, bluetooth audio, GPS, rearview cameras were standard equipment on mid-high end models by 2015 so it's not something you need to go new for. Car design was in a much better place 2010-2015 than it was 1980-2005, so used cars look better than they used to, and improved paint prevents that sun-faded look old trucks used to get. ((Maybe I'm just crotchety, but I also think that car design has gone into decline in the last couple years as companies compete to be more EXTREME on the one end, more aggressive and less friendly all around, and all the SUVs start to look like fish.))
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