> In reality having a car and traveling lots of miles every day is the cheapest variant for most people.
Realistically, it's the _only_ way to get around the US.
Realistically, it's the _only_ way to get around the US.
In most of the Old World, cities have existed for centuries—if not millennia—and were built for the human foot, not the car tyre. Hence most European and Asian city centres are dense, mostly walkable, and fairly small. From the 1800s onward as transport speeds have increased they've built dense mid-/high-rises in the suburban bits, and developed cheap, efficient, and highly-utilised bus and heavy rail public transport, both within and between cities.
Many such cities additionally have 'green belts' to prevent urban sprawl.
Actually I am misrepresenting the situation in the USA.
The US expanded with the railways, and many American cities were built along and at the end of railways.
But then in the 1950s, Americans collectively decided that public transport was useless and they bulldozed through their city centres, ripped up the trams and railways, and splatted veritable plates of highway spaghetti right through the middle of their cities (often through slums and ghettos mainly housing poorer people of African descent).
The causality for this was mostly the other way around. There was a lot of empty land around the cities -- unlike most of Europe or Asia -- so once cars became available people started moving there because they could get more space for less money and still commute into the city by car for work.
The real problem is that the people who did this didn't want the city encroaching on their suburban space, but that space was directly next to the city. So they zoned it for single-family homes only and then the only way to add new housing is for the city to expand horizontally. Which needs more roads and parking and reduces use of mass transit which in turn gets discontinued.
What you need isn't mass transit, it's to allow condos and mixed-use zoning in what is currently the suburbs, to reconstitute enough density that mass transit can actually work.