The tax on space, time, and energy required to move a bunch of people around in individual little containers is far too high.
The road infrastructure is already there, and has been already subsidized. It is my opinion that private autonomous transportation will become more efficient and cheaper than public transportation and therefore will supplant it. I speak not as the world expert, but as someone who did a relatively deep analysis of transportation costs in US cities. The ballpark figure is what I call TCTM, or Total Cost of Transportation per Mile, which doesn't take into account the cost of road infrastructure, simply assuming that it is already there. TCTM for uber/lyft and similar services is going down, and you do not even need fully autonomous, level-5 driverless cars, to have a TCTM lower than that offered by public buses.
Hope this is clearer.
I'll grant you the space and energy inefficiency of private cars, but the time factor seems wildly in favor of point-to-point random route transport.
The idea of having a dedicated lane with incredibly reliable timing is obviously better than the uncertainty of traffic.
I would be curious to see a breakdown for metro areas, where public transit is actually useful (obviously cars work fine for most of rural America, and add a bus system when necessary). But I have no idea if that analysis is available.
I am heavily biased towards cities with awful traffic, where I would like to see less traffic.
Also, for the most part, driving is just faster, even in cities with bad traffic. I'm pretty lucky--I've got a train station 22 minutes from my house that drops me off an 8-minute walk away from work (with no transfers). Driving in involves fighting through rush-hour traffic from one end of D.C. to the opposite end, but it's still no slower on the way in, and 20 minutes faster on the way out. All those stops just make the train slow.
[1] Average house size in the US is twice as big as in Japan or Western Europe: https://www.elledecor.com/life-culture/fun-at-home/news/a765...
[2] Americans have 50% more cars per capita than the EU average.
If you have fewer passengers per square mile then you either need smaller vehicles or less frequent operation to fill larger ones. People naturally prefer the first option.
But the country isn't a city. It would be possible for an individual US city to have the population density required to support more effective mass transit (at least to the extent that it exists in Europe or Asia). NYC is the highest density major city in the US and largely manages to do that.
To make it work elsewhere would require the same sort of densities as New York, which would require allowing people to build more high density housing there.
Certainly not anything like Kansas City or Tucson, because you have to have enough density pressure around the city to actually require tall buildings. If you can satisfy all the local housing demand with single family homes and still have plenty of empty land within reasonable distance of the city center, there isn't enough reason to compress it into a smaller area just to have taller buildings and put things a little closer together. But those cities also don't have anything near the same traffic problems either.
Where you're really screwed is in places like Los Angeles and Houston, where you have large populations but also so much sprawl and undeveloped land that taller buildings aren't really justified. So they end up in this unhappy medium with enough population density to have bad traffic but not enough to have good mass transit, and weak demand for higher density housing.
But that still doesn't justify the zoning restrictions that exist in a lot of these places. Houston largely doesn't have them while Los Angeles does, and you can check for yourself the difference in rent. Even if without them Los Angeles still wouldn't be New York, because it would at least be better than it is.
Maywood is 23K/mi^2 with several other LA incorporated areas in the 15-20K/mi^2 density. Houston is under 10K/mi^2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Even with that, it seems like zoning isn't what's kept LA rents high. LA has parts that are fairly dense and more free zoning doesn't seem to have made Houston become notably dense.
That's kind of the point. Less restrictive zoning isn't going to make areas like that a lot more dense, because they're huge areas with open spaces and people aren't going to build skyscrapers surrounded by empty lots even if they're allowed to.
The problem LA has is that they have some areas zoned for density, but not enough of them. So you get a section full of skyscrapers and correspondingly a lot of demand for housing near there, but then zoning that requires low density housing in nearby sections, which keeps rents high because that low density housing would otherwise have been replaced by medium density housing.
Whereas with Houston you have some high density areas, but with less zoning the density falls off more organically and it's more of a medium density everywhere than high density in one place and low density right next to it. Which isn't much better for traffic when the average density comes out the same, but it's a lot better for rents, because it makes for a lot less scarcity in the market for land where medium and high density housing can be built.