I agree. And I further state that by chooses one's housing and its location carefully, one can get along fine using mass transit.

What makes Austin's mass transit system bad is that there is a LOT of "you can't get there from here" about it. Ithaca has very infrequent buses so you need to have the schedule memorized or in your bag to not wait in the snow for half an hour for the next bus. And both systems have very limited numbers of buses running after 9pm.