Picture a US old suburban area as a network of multi lane roads on something like 5 to 10 mile spacings. These roads will be lined with businesses. There will be some area of small shops on the road, some of strip centers. Maybe a big mall. Some office buildings. Behind these buildings it becomes residential. There will be bus service along these major arteries.

So, choose to live on an artery near a bus stop, and that entire artery becomes available to you for employment without owning a car.

It’s true, you can’t get to arbitrary residential addresses without long walks, but commerce is on the arteries. Try to avoid needing transfers to a different artery. That is a huge time sink.

Newer suburbs, 20+ miles from city center, are different. They only have commerce at the intersection of arteries or specialized areas and this does not work for bus riding.

This is all for fungible employees in fungible jobs. If you are a skilled professional in a suburban employment your pay will be high enough to have a car and live in the quieter areas off the arteries.

> I understand that in the USA public transportation is quite lacking except for a few big cities.

I won't pretend it's the greatest but I've lived in quite a few 2nd and 3rd tier US cities like Phoenix, Atlanta, Jacksonville Fl, Nashville, Knoxville TN and quite a few others and the buses are certainly capable of getting you to work and back. Everywhere I've lived the buses run 7 days a week from early in the AM to late at night and some run 24 hours a day in Atlanta. Pretty much any bus route will see a bus come along every 20 or 30 minutes with some stretching out to 45 minutes. Some routes though will see a bus every 5 or 10 minutes depending on the day and time.

Even in Jacksonville FL which has more land area I think any other US city, there is no urban part of the city that is more than a half mile from a bus stop. You can even take a bus from the north extreme end of the city to the extreme south, where a shuttle connects that will then take you to St. Augustine (a suburb of Jacksonville), a grand total of probably 60 miles, for less than $4 total. That doesn't seem too bad. Is it perfect? No. But I think the public transportation system problems may be a little overblown at least in the cities I've lived in.