And the crazy thing is I don't consider my neighborhood a transportation desert at all, it's about 10 min walk to Metro. The lines just don't work out properly.

Unfortunately the public transit route to my son's school (NE to NE) is 1 hour each way, while driving is 20 minutes. As much as I support transit, I can't make this large time sacrifice, personally, as I imagine most cannot. When I had a lot of PG coworkers their situations were similar.