Loads of other countries also have great public transportation, especially when the current state of the USA is what’s being compared against. Possibly including the USA itself before cars got going.
> Or do certain things work better under certain conditions, and it's pretty much the exact same thing everything that probably doesn't scale?
The thing which public transport needs to be good at scaling is passengers per hour per land area.
In this regard, approximately all public transport — bus, light rail, heavy rail, tram, ferry, underground — scales better than cars.
This is why the Swiss built them, as all those steep hillsides and valleys already have houses in them, and tunnels (regardless of if they’re road or rail) are expensive.
Seriously, why does this trope of saying “oh America can’t possibly, it’s such a big country” even exist, when the USA also has a road network despite being big and those roads are themselves generally much wider than Europe’s roads? It’s not like public transport is some special magic category that’s different from all the civil infrastructure the USA already makes, the only difference seems to be that “public” is a dirty word.
More recently I visited a much nicer midwestern town which is planning an expansion of its bus network amd optimizing traffic lights for better bus flow. There is a new mall on the bus line. The difference is that 95% of bus riders in this second town are upper middle class college students.
Ah yes, because that’s the wrong dimension in the first place. Population density is the one that matters.