The network never "choked" at 1.3tps. There are peaks of activity near the theoretical max of 7 tps (check for blocks close to 1MB in size). There are thousands of unconfirmed transactions because their senders chose to include fees that are too low (or no fee at all), so miners decide to not process them.
> When new coins are no longer being awarded to miners then people will have to start to pay the transaction fees themselves
That's not how it works. People (senders) already pay the transaction fees themselves.
+.1715506 worth of transaction fees. That's by far not enough to support a decent mining rate. In order to support current mining rate a single block must have roughly 25BTC wort of transactions fees.
Yes, they pay the transaction fees, but not the transaction costs. He wanted to say that transaction fees will become as high as the transaction costs.
> When new coins are no longer being awarded to miners then people will have to start to pay the transaction fees themselves
That's not how it works. People (senders) already pay the transaction fees themselves.