Nolan makes cerebral films for dumb people. I find most of them to be entertaining and fun, but they do lean a bit too much into profundity as a vibe without a whole lot of actual substance.
my gf in Tokyo years ago was a country folk singer. played slide on a metal resonator guitar. for much of my time there my evenings were spent at folks and roots music bars, listening to talented live musicians. in States we live in abject poverty, culturally.
your reasoning falls apart because mass transit options are inherently faster due to the geometric-space efficiencies gained by their form factors. You just need to induce enough people to participate in it to cross a tipping point where it becomes financially viable to run regular service, e.g., in NYC taking a train is often the fastest.
“There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.”
― Ben Horowitz
This is precisely the reasoning I bring up. In essence traffic congestion is an externality not unlike pollution. What society now pays in the form of a financial levy it formerly paid in the form of a wasted time. We've made explicit a cost that was already there, and by doing so the system can respond to it and behave more intelligently.
TLDR; libertarian take that misses a lot of structural and historical factors. save yourself wasting the fifteen minutes on this high school grade evolutionary psychology postulating
This sounds exactly like the team/culture that launched Marcus at Goldman Sachs. A lot of people went to Amazon from that team and seemed to indicate it was very much the same type of deal.