"Public transit has its use, but I generally hate it except in rare situations like Zurich or Berlin."
From the parent:
"I'm in Japan at the moment, and I can't help but agree - it's clean, fast, the trains come exactly when they say they will"
This: (how nice (insert public service here) is in CH/nordic/germany/japan) compared to the United States is always submitted as some kind of perplexing accident - like only some weird burst of cosmic rays could possibly explain why, for instance, polite behaviors on buses are so much better in Tokyo than they are in Cleveland.
But it's not confusing or strange at all: a homogenous society is easy to make work.
Oh, you have a whole city full of Lars Larsons and Handt Hansons ? Why, however do you make such a place work ? How amazing that everything comes together just so and there is no animosity between net tax payers and net tax receivers.
Well, of course there isn't. It's easy to work and live together with people and provide funding for their social benefit when their name is John Johnsson just like yours is.
The US is not easy. It's not an easy place. We have interesting problems that are going to be harder to figure out than pedantically pointing at the nordic countries.
On the other hand, we invented jazz and stuck a flag on the moon, so we've got that going for us - which is nice.