But you can't expect the same in the US Midwest, for instance, where countryside and suburban living is prevalent. It's just impractical, so cars reign supreme.
And a dedication to dense urban living would also seriously impact the development of those regions. Remote mining/lumber towns. Enormous farmsteads. The loan cowboy walking a fence for days. These are romantic concepts but they are also how resources are extracted efficiently. If people only ever stayed near mass transportation hubs North America would not be the powerhouse it is. To this day, huge areas of economic activity rely on that most common of tools: a person with a truck able to go where needed on a moment's notice. Beyond the suburbs, when your power goes out at 3am or your farm catches fire, the first and most likely only people on the scene will be driving their own vehicles.
For example, I am taking classes 5 days a week, but live 100 miles away in a farming community. Due to the nature of the course work, a significant portion is hands-on and cannot be done online. The campus has no charging stations and only relatively recently have electric cars had sufficient range.
Oh, and once it's cold out, you might find out that you now no longer have the range to make it to where you need to go on a single charge. Maybe the car tells you in advance, or it doesn't and it runs out of juice, which a simple jerry-can isn't going to solve for obvious reasons.
Electric cars are inferior to gasoline-powered ones in the long term due to their very nature as a consumable product and require more expensive maintenance to continue being useful than a gasoline car will over its useful lifetime. That is, if the car company even bothers to make replacement batteries, since the battery is the bulk of the cost of the car in the first place.
Countryside living in some parts of Europe gets a bus even half an hour - enough to be useful for people who have a choice (but still annoying)
If you need a car at your destination, then shared transportation moves way down the list of preferred options.
That a car is practical in many situations, i have no doubt. However being on the countryside doesn't mean you can't get trains near you. Half a century ago in France most folks on the countryside had a train station within walking range (or at least biking range) with a few trains going through every day.
But these stations/rails have been discontinued in orchestrated policies dismantling public services (along with the hospitals, schools, etc). You can clearly see the result of such policy on a map of railway networks in France through time:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Railway_...
Simply because modern capitalist politics consider the countryside as an enormous farm or waste dump doesn't mean it is the only way.
Also related, some french regions still have countryside buses going regularly and for a cheap fare (1-2€). It's simply a matter of policy/will.
This doesn’t even begin to factor in just how sparse rural areas of the United States really are.
The places that would see the most benefit are the suburbs, and ironically many blue states would benefit the most; and also have a rampant amount of NIMBYism to prevent this from ever happening.
Fair enough. But that doesn't refute entirely the idea that collective transportation could (not necessarily would) be more efficient / ecological.
In principle every city should have a well-running light rail or subway; and high speed trains can (and should) connect major metros.
In reality, politics and NIMBYism makes this impossible.
Eminent domain was meant to address this but somehow it’s abused for realtors and small-scale owners and not so much for grand, infrastructure projects that it was meant for.
The United States could have gone a very direction, but we’re living with the legacy of Robert Moses—-who even then had to battle NIMBYism—who favored roads and cars.
Better still, sometimes they are completely free, in villages with high tourism.