Originally Posted by mattscq

I imagine America's disinterest in public transportation is probably complicated but here are my theories:

1) America has always had a strong individualist mentality and for a long time, the automobile was a symbol of freedom and self-determination. For many young Americans, owning a car was as much an existential symbol as it was a practical means of just getting places

2) Most American cities are too low-density. This is probably a chicken/egg thing. American cities are low density because the car allowed them to be low density and their low density makes cars a necessity to get around. Early modern urban designers saw the automobile as a sort of liberation of congestion and dirty high density industrial cities—while European thinkers like Le Corbusier et al would imagine vast automobile networks connecting towers in a garden, America actually had the land and wealth to make it happen. Even early American urban design (think Thomas Jefferson and the Jeffersonian grid and its rationalization of America, the land) was of a low-density sort.

3) With low density, it becomes too inefficient and costly to run a public transportation network. I grew up in a suburb without a driver's license and you'd have to walk 15 minutes to a bus stop where a bus comes every 30 minutes so you can go to the LRT station which would take another 20 minutes to take you downtown. It wasn't for lack of funding or will. The city was just too sprawled out and most people had a car anyway.

4) Most American cities have zoning/building codes that are heavily car-centric which doesn't help to ween people off the reliance of cars. When your cities and buildings are designed around cars, you kinda need a car even if you don't want one.

5) As some have pointed out here, there's little political will to fund public transportation. Even cities which desperately need it (New York comes to mind) frequently find itself with budget short falls and rapidly deteriorating infrastructure. American infrastructure, ask anybody, Republicans, Democrats, anybody in between, and they will agree that it's a mess—but nobody can quite agree on how to fix it.

The sad thing is a lot of "cutting edge" thinkers, i.e. Google's Sidewalk Labs or Uber etc. imagine the future of mobility to be some sort of self-driving car service but really, the future of sustainable, affordable, and ergo equitable mobility is probably a bus.