Perhaps the first is true, but I think (and believe I could substantiate) that traffic sucks a lot worse: for instance, I can read/zone-out/listen to a podcast on public transit; if I do those things in traffic, I meet the back of the car in front of me.
You know what’s better than any of these? Having people live near where they work, so they can walk or ride a bike to commute.
But for larger areas and longer trips, roads hit a hard limit after a certain point. Car traffic in denser urban areas around the world inevitably turns into a quagmire. Self-driving cars aren’t going to fix that, and they have nowhere near the passenger capacity of a subway line.
I’ll agree with you that buses can be terrible though, especially enormous heavy slow buses that run mostly empty half the time and stop every block or two. Ideally bus lines would switch to smaller vehicles at non-peak times, and during commute hours cities would work harder to get them dedicated lanes so they wouldn’t get stuck in car traffic.
