> But in America, it doesn't make sense in most cases without subsidies

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.