You write "For distances over 20 miles, if you can't beat car travel for a family of 4 (about 8 cents per mile per person) you suck at your job." Like many oth

You write "For distances over 20 miles, if you can't beat car travel for a family of 4 (about 8 cents per mile per person) you suck at your job." Like many other critics of cars, you seem to implicitly consider the value of travellers' time to be negligible, so that you don't need to consider it even in a context where they are talking about a cost meter ticking at 8 cents per minute or so. There are annoying rhetorical tricks in the other direction employed by fans of cars, like pointedly ignoring the cost of pollution or pointedly pretending that expensive required-by-law facilities (notably parking) are not costs. But as much as those pro-car rhetorical tricks distort reality, they seldom seem to distort the reality of the situation as badly as the anti-car trick of treating the value of the traveller's time as negligible. Across the people who can afford to travel by car, "negligible compared to $4.80/hr" is an extremely bad approximation for the value of time.