Exception: the New York regional rail system. Its on-time stats are comparable to Switzerland.
We love to talk about subways and intercity high-speed rail. But in America, it doesn't make sense in most cases without subsidies. Drive-on / drive-off regional rail, on the other hand, trades pursim for pragmatism and could really work in our car-dependent metros.
That's the point of public transit, and that's the case everywhere. Also that of roads; roads wouldn't exist without government subsidies because nobody wants to pay toll to exit their driveways.
Of course you'd need to reduce car dependency for any public transit system to make sense, and I don't think Americans care for that. For some reason, "15 minute towns" were turned into some kind of boogeymen to scare conservatives for a while during the last election cycle, which says a lot about the American approach to infrastructure design.
This is what I mean. To reduce car dependence given America's built infrastructure, demographics and geographic spread, you'd have to build such a massive amount of public transportation that I think--outside major metropolitan areas--it would be cheaper to stick to cars.
> But in America, it doesn't make sense in most cases without subsidies.