I completely agree with this article. As someone who has lived with varying amounts of transit most of my adult life, I definitely see the strong correlation to inertia limiting my transit use.

When I lived downtown, hit that “discontinuity” they talked about, transit became a habit, an indispensable part of my life and my freedom. I didn’t understand people living without it. While I keep my car, it was mostly an annoyance I needed for occasional road trips and visiting the boonies

However now that I live in a suburb

• when I worked downtown I could have walked or cycled to the train station but weather and potential inconvenience stopped me. I got back Into the car habit to get to the train station and needed another discontinuity to break me out of it. I walk past there a couple times a week for relaxation so there’s clearly no challenge
• now that I work in the next town over there is no transit but it’s nearby so has a solid argument for cycling or electrified personal transportation. But again I’m back in the car habit (plus free charging!). It seems inconvenient with the weather, hills, no safe route, but I wonder if it’s more the habit. I’d there was a discontinuity to help me break that habit, would I better enjoy a non-car commute?

Insufficient transit

It's cause property tax encourages sprawl.

Everything is far from everything. Downtown is single-story buildings spaced out by vacant lots. All your friends live far away. It's suspiciously convenient for a police state to control people who literally can't reach each other without traveling through long gauntlets of cameras on roads where you must have a license and aren't allowed to walk.

"Even when better options for commuting are available, people usually don’t make the switch."

Interesting working hypothesis... Sadly the article and the "studies" cited are total bullshit.

It's full of second-hand conclusions based on studying only tangentially related topics to build the narrative how people wouldn't change their commuting habits anyway.

That's basically the whole actual content: people are creatures of habit so we can assume that they would not easily change those habits. We haven't actually checked because their is basically no representative area with better commuting options... but we areclaiming it anyway to keep those alternative options neglected. 👏

My commute is 15min by car, 45min by bike, 2hrs by foot

If my commute by foot or bike was 15min, and the trip by car was 45min-2hrs I would choose to walk or bike.