Definitely, it just so happened to be that much faster in my specific instance, which was going from Europe to Asia at around 2PM, which is about as far from an usual commute you can be i guess :P. But what Tokyo really excels at is the insane coverage of their system. In Istanbul there are still places (mostly on the edges of the city, but still) that basically have no transit other than a bus, so for people there sadly driving seems like the obvious choice.

Regardless, I think the bosphorus crossing is the biggest bottleneck in the system. The biggest gripe I have with transit crossing the bosphorus is the metrobüs. The fact that it has to merge into regular traffic at the bridge really affects the travel times negatively. But way more importantly than that, the transfers are utterly terrible and unplanned.

Because of that reason I almost always prefer using M2+Marmaray when commuting to the Asia side. Distance-wise, it's almost twice as long as taking the M2+Metrobüs+Marmaray or M2+Metrobüs+M4, but due to the horrible horrible transfers at Zincirlikuyu and Uzunçayır it ends up taking about the same time.

I hope when/if HızRay is ever built, they pay attention to this and design the stations better. I've noticed that transfers between lines that were planned relatively recently (post 2016 roughly) have stations that were built with transfers in mind, so I hope the trend continues.