Well, I think the aside came about from a wider philosophical issue: Whether the individual or the collective is the best director of the commons. If you look at it in that frame, issues surrounding public transportation and public education are exactly the same thing—if you believe that the individual is the best way of dealing with things, then both publicly funded education and transportation systems are at least partially suspect; on the other hand, if the collective is the best for it, then they’re both excellent.
There’s actually some good evidence out there that such preferences actually affect our perceptions (possibly through confirmation bias, but that isn’t universally accepted as the mechanism for it), so that someone who’s suspicious of collectivist tendencies may well observe, say, a subway car as dirty and smelly, while someone who embraces collective action may observe that the exact same subway car at the exact same time is clean and well-kept.
This, as you might have already concluded, creates issues when it comes to things like public policy debates.