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I live in a city/state where public transportation is actively inconvenient and even then I made a considerable effort to take it and avoid driving when I could. The waste of time and brain capacity sitting behind a steering wheel like a frikking dummy is insane - I was able to get so much reading and work done on a train/bus while the best I could do while driving was listen to an audiobook, assuming it didn't take away too much attention from the waste of time that was driving.

I see this as a kind of Stockholm syndrome. Your time is being held hostage by your commute, so you cope with ways to use that time. I was the same way. At first, I was stuck commuting for 75+ minutes to and from work on public transit. Most of this was spent walking, because it was actually faster to bee-line on foot for the office downtown than trying to jump between inner city transit options. I read books on the train or did crosswords when able, but the train ride altogether was maybe 20 minutes long, with maybe 5 minutes spent waiting at the stop (if it wasn't late). So about 25 minutes I could spend "productively" by reading on the way in, and another 25 on the way back. Assuming the train wasn't jam packed by the time it arrived, leaving me hardly any room to even hold a handrail let alone do anything else, which was not a rare occurrence.

Then my employer finally got me a free parking pass for the building (there was a waiting list) and I said goodbye to public transport. My 75+ minute commute became a 25 minute drive, saving me 100 minutes a day I could spend on leisure instead of commuting. What undercuts this happy turn of events is that Covid came in a few months later and my prized parking pass became irrelevant as I was working from home.

And this made me realize enjoying ANY kind of commute is essentially Stockholm syndrome. What's better than a short drive OR reading on the train? Reading at home, in my big comfy chair with a cup of coffee, right up until it's time to start work, never having to take off my slippers.

I agree with you there - commuting, especially in the form of "everyone needs to be in the office by 9am", which leads to gridlock on the transport mechanisms and a completely avoidable collective waste of time, is a pretty cruel farce imposed on the workforce. For most jobs, a no-commute situation is pretty great and staggered work start times would be very helpful for those jobs that require (edited) in-office presence.

Munich has been working on its density for 864 years, and back then there weren't many cars. Its pretty different comparing to a lot of the US which literally wasn't built until after cars existed and widely available to most families. Practically all of the city I live in was built after 1950, easily 75% of it was built post 1970, almost half of it built post 1985. I live in a neighborhood in a somewhat "older" part of town, and my house was built in 1988. The road I drive to work wasn't even really paved until the 90s.

When you're building a city at a time when most families can easily own a car and the average family wants to own a car, you build your cities around cars. When you build your city >700 years before cars even exist, you design around other concerns. I do agree building the city around the car was a shortsighted decision, but its kind of a hard genie to put back in the bottle.

Most cities are less dense today because they got re-modeled to be more car friendly in the 60ies and 70ies.

and way bigger. Those cities are mostly new, relatively seen, the population exploded not so long ago. Medieval cities were small towns in comparison.

The big part though is the urban core existed hundreds before many US cities even had a name. Sure, Munich's borders looked very different 800 years ago, but the rest of the city largely continued to expand and rebuild around that core central idea. Dallas literally didn't exist until the 1850s, and at that point it was essentially just a train stop and a place to load and unload small barges on the small river. By 1850 Munich was definitely a large city with an obvious urban area. Dallas wouldn't even approach something like Munich until well into the 1900s, well into the oil boom and it grew further from just oil fields.

Also it's practically always been cheaper to own and operate an automobile in the US compared to most of Europe. We're really only starting to get to the point where US people are actually evaluating if driving a car is really worth it, if the US had high oil prices since the 1970s oil shocks I imagine our current cities would look a lot different.

My preferences and your preferences are irrelevant in terms of how our cities are constructed. Many areas on this side of the Atlantic were built after cars become common, and many people who bought new homes in those neighborhoods during post WWII expansion preferred driving their new cars.

I don’t get to change that now, unless we tear my entire neighborhood down.

I suspect the area you live in was settled prior to the ubiquity of cars, and thus, was designed for people without them.

I think those systems are undergoing continuous change, so change is always possible. I also don't think that the area I lived in grew up in fact designed before the ubiquity of cars (I grew up suburban but not rural), although I currently live in the old-city of a small student town, since I want to live more urban. But yeah, it's easier if there's a structure suited to public transit (if the suburban towns have a "core" that's connected by rail to the city and nut just evenly spread out, or enough density anyway etc.).

But I originally just wanted to get at that public transportation not a myth, not forced on people, but preferred by many all over the world.

They’re under continuous incremental change. The problem is that infrastructure has momentum that lasts centuries. The infrastructure that works well is the infrastructure that people want to use and it’s the infrastructure that people want to invest in, and people make their living decisions around the current state.

US suburbs are often sprawled out enough that they aren’t really walkable. There’s a millennia of incremental changes that you’d have to make to an area like Phoenix to make it look anything like a walkable dense city.

I lived in a country with amazing public transport - clean, on-time, accessible everywhere.

What did people do who made a lot of money? Buy a car.