Americans are so resistant to public transportation because the public seriously sucks to deal with. There will be no popular utilization of public transit until we implement strong economic safety nets and extensive support/mandatory detention of people that are mentally ill. Those problems are much harder to overcome while maintaining an American standard of personal liberty than even the complications surrounding building rail. As a native of San Francisco and the surrounding area I have tried for decades to utilize public transit. The infrastructure isn’t great, but it’s also not terrible or anything. But in years where my job/living situation have me using public transit every day, my rate of exposure to human excrement or someone who wouldn’t even be aware that they physically harmed me was greater than once a week. In phases of my life where I’m driving everywhere that rate is practically zero. That stress takes a toll on my health that I have a natural instinct to avoid.
The lack of other places for people to go often leaves public transit facilities as a place for homeless people to congregate or seek shelter.
The US also tends to treat public transit as welfare transit in general. A transportation option of last resort for those who can't afford a car, where the primary goal is being inexpensive, instead of being the best and most efficient way to move around a city for all citizens.
Transit stations in the US also generally don't have revenue-generating amenities like food, coffee, or shopping. This makes them money sinks instead of revenue sources that pay for their own cleaning and security etc.
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.”
But the problem you're not understanding is that we're not Europe. We don't all live in cities within a couple of miles of our workplaces. Even me, I've got a sixty mile commute, I'm fortunate that there is a commuter train -- but I still have to drive five miles to get to the station. There's no other way, it's not even safe to walk if I felt like walking five miles. I can't live where I work, it would triple my mortgage.
I can't go anywhere else on a train. I can't go to the grocery store on a train, there aren't any.
The US is big. It's just the way it is, and it's not going to change.
It also used to have streetcar networks in most major cities and suburbs. And shops you could walk to from your house.
Amsterdam used to have a city center full of cars, parking lots, and no bike paths.
Things can change. It’s harder for them to change when we sit around and say “It’s just the way it is, it’s not going to change”
We have a train network. Amtrak is barely used, costs more than flying, and you still have to rent a car at the end of your multi-day trip on the train. The US is HUGE.
I lived in a mass transit society (Japan) for years. It's fundamentally different, in ways that aren't changeable.
We literally built a nationwide interstate highway system in this country which included bulldozing downtowns and spending the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars to do it. That wasn't that long ago, we're the same country in most ways.
It's a political problem at all levels. Not a technology or physics problem.
Looking at the full scope of the country and saying because the overall problem is large we can't take any steps to improve it is defeatist.
I was specifically responding to a quote that trips of 50-300 miles are too long for public transit. That is demonstrably untrue around the world.
And using that as a justification to try to solve the problem using personal airplanes instead of real working solutions that scale to high capacity at low emissions seems silly to me.