The fixed costs of public transport options, given the significant investment of public money that they tend to represent, are not zero either. The marginal cos

The fixed costs of public transport options, given the significant investment of public money that they tend to represent, are not zero either. The marginal cost of a journey is far more salient to whether a given option is preferable to any given person. Traffic jams are an extremely variable issue and I would argue are directly analogous to being crammed onto a delayed train with a thousand other people who can barely move - that is, essentially a rush hour problem that is more about throughput and the madness of commuting than it is about any particular specific form of transport. Also note that your other examples violate my overarching point which is that they're about externalities. They don't represent advantages to the users' near term needs/desires, and in the case of my personal feelings about cyclists are actively in opposition, so they're almost always going to be fighting an uphill battle for mass acceptance.