For those of us living in the "outside" world where public transport are the norm, it is sometimes hard to understand why public transport is treated so differently in US.
1. Public transit is very slow relative to cars. This is because the U.S. was mostly built after the invention of the car, which means road capacity is higher, parking is easier, and distances are farther. Even in places with decent public transit, it takes 2-3x as long to get somewhere on public transit as driving a car.
2. The U.S. is a rich country and more people can afford their own car or to take a taxi/rideshare.
3. Public transit is less comfortable and convenient. It involves walking and waiting outside, possibly in bad weather, and possibly crowding. If you are carrying things with you or bringing small children, the hassle is magnified trying to maneuver through small spaces with large items quickly.
Is this true? It was my understanding that a large % of Americans can't even afford to buy a car and have to take out a loan as well as cutting down on other living expenses to have enough money to drive to work.
Regardless of whether it’s “affordable” to own a car, people do it anyway.
Financing for vehicles in the US is very accessible. There are dealerships who advertise on the radio in my city that they cater to people with “multiple bankruptcies”, and “no drivers license”, with little to no money down.
As a more extreme anecdote:
I had a bad roommate in college who spent almost all of the money from his part time minimum wage job on alcohol. He routinely “bought” a car, didn’t make the payments, and when the tow truck showed up to repossess it, he just went out and “bought” another the next day.
His high-risk loans didn’t have great terms, but he always had a car.
Also, even with some of the lowest required insurance minimums in the developed world, the number of uninsured drivers in the US is huge. There are insurance companies that will give you insurance for a single day too... just long enough to register your car and get a license plate.
Used cars are super cheap in the US too, and in most places, inspection requirements are minimal. You can buy old and ugly but running vehicles for less than a yearly bus pass in many places.
Public transit really isn't an option for most people in the US, and even if it is, unless a transit pass is subsidized, a car like that is probably more cost effective even including fuel, maintenance, and insurance, not to mention the savings in time and freedom provided by a car (any car).
But in general, I’m just saying that cars have low barriers to obtain here, for whatever the situation may be. That situation is sometimes necessity, but not always. This is not a phenomenon that only exists in places without public transit.
I also wanted to convey is that the concept of “affordable” isn’t exactly comparable across cultures, classes, and backgrounds.
As you may know, cars are a status symbol in the US. My roommate in the example above absolutely considered himself able to afford a car. Even though we lived in a place with a viable bus route that would have taken him everywhere he needed to go, his car was an essential enough part of his identity, lifestyle, and status that he decided to prioritize it as he did.
Even so, even in say, Paris inside the ring, it's typically faster to take a taxi than the Metro. Go on Google maps and pick some random routes and see for yourself.
As soon as you go to a smaller city or travel outside the densest part of the city, the car becomes dramatically faster.
My observation is that hedge fund managers do not typically take the subway. They have chauffeured cars so that they can make productive use of their time while driving. In the rare instance that transit is faster, being able to simply sit down and take calls, do email, etc is very valuable and is not practical on most forms of transit. Certainly confidential calls are a no-go, and laptops are not practical except on some commuter rail. Furthermore, on most transit trips, the time is broken up. At minimum you have walking time, then waiting time, then moving time, then more walking time. With transfers it's broken up even more. You'd be lucky to have 1/3 of the time sitting in a seat where you could peck out emails on a smartphone.
It starts when transportation planners get the "bright idea" to cancel lines that don't have some threshold of number of riders. On paper that looks good because it culls the lines that aren't as profitable, allowing the operating budget to shrink. In reality, it makes transit slightly less attractive, less flexible to riders, and it means that some places aren't reachable directly, conveniently or at all.
Decades of this kind of behavior coupled with increasing distaste for public expenditures and you're left with a transit system that only serves patrons whose time is worth almost nothing, who are desperate enough to burn 1-2 hours of travel to get to places that are reachable in 20 minutes by private vehicles.
It is worth remembering that the US is much larger than all of Europe, is considerably less dense, and much of it was not well-developed until after automobiles were in wide use.
Public transit doesn't make logistical sense in much of the country. It does make sense in some places, of course, but it's less of a part of the national culture because there are so many areas where it's not a good idea.
Much of the U.S. and many suburbs were developed with streetcars in mind that were later removed in favor of private car ownership.
Yes, there are many cities in the US with enough density to support public transit. Most of them have it.
My point is that public transit is not a large part of American culture and history which significantly depresses demand for it.
Most Americans grew up in families that owned a car or two and used them to get everywhere. When you ask an American how to get groceries, their immediate mental image is getting in a car, taking a long drive to a big store, and filling up the car with a week or two's worth of stuff. Tell them they can't own a car and all of a sudden they don't know how to solve mundane problems like this anymore. There are other perfectly fine solutions, of course, but they don't know those solutions yet. It's not part of their culture.
Also, most Americans live or at least grew up in cities whose urban planning was designed around automobiles and parking lots. They are spread out to make room for parking lots, which in turn makes public transit slower and less economical. People need cars because cities are too spread out for transit because people prefer to drive because they have cars because cities are too spread out...
There is a huge path dependent effect here where most cities aren't laid out for public transit and most people don't prioritize it.
People from outside of the US love to criticize how stupid Americans are for not having great buses and rail everywhere, but few want to acknowledge that no country is free of its own history and culture. Cars are a big part of ours. We are making progress, but the physical topology of cities and the culture loaded into the heads of several hundred million people cannot be refactored as easily as code.
I am an American and I don't get it either. I think it varies by geography, where else you might have lived, etc. I grew up on the east coast and always hated taxis, and didn't like to drive.
It also doesn't help that transit agencies in smaller cities have been degenerate. Their answer for declines in ridership is to consolidate and cut service, not improve the network, which leads to more decline, and more consolidation, until you end up with a place like many commenters in this thread where 1 bus comes every hour, usually following the path of a former streetcar right of way that was ripped out by monied interests 70 years ago.