Yes, but it moves more people. Driving doesn’t need to compete with public transit for speed—transit is immensely slower than driving even in places with excellent transit.
This is actually a very American misconception of public transportation. If you're in an area with excellent public tranportation (London, Barcelona, Montreal), it's actually much faster (I've traveled to these places and tried it).
Even in SF, there's some places where public transportation is faster. But in very very limited situations because SF transportation is horrible. But an express Caltrain is often much faster than driving MTV-SF if there's any traffic. With all the (super delayed unfortunately) infrastructure projects going on (new SF subway being installed, Caltrain electrification), things will hopefully get better...
This is not universally true. My BART commute is faster than driving. Both office and home are walkable from a train station and the frequency at my station is pretty good.
Transit is much faster than driving if it wants to be. Airplanes normally reach 1000km/h (if you are rich you can do the same but very few are this rich). Even if we limit to ground based transport, most drivers on the autobahn self-limit themselves to around 130km/h, trains routinely go 250km/h (only a few routes, but the ability is there to do it safely).
Not unless your starting point and ending point are very close to a subway station and you don’t have to make any transfers. I use to commute from 88th and broadway to 45th and Lex. It was a bit over 30 minutes by subway, more like 25 minutes driving. In the evening, if I was leaving work late, it was like a 20 minute cab ride.
