[sokoloff]

Make public transport remotely competitive with private transport on a time basis and people will flock to it in cities. In cities where public transport is effective (many European capitals and pretty much just NYC and select parts of DC and Chicago in the US), people of all strata of life use it because it's time effective to do so. Because "everyone" is using it, it feels (and usually is) reasonably safe, clean, and "normal".

In other cities in the US, it's so broken that people with time pressure and money in their lives don't use it (and so don't particularly support it from a policy/voting perspective either). Predictably, it's no longer "normal" and feels less clean and safe (and might actually be so).

[bunderbunder]

Sadly, that ship may have already sailed in most North American communities. A this point, they're _very_ heavily engineered to favor private vehicle ownership. Many of the ones I spend time in are so sprawled out that it takes me more time to get my errands done by car than it does for me to do them on foot in my home town.

(And then you need to waste even more time going to the gym regularly in order to make up for the desperately sedentary lifestyle that's been imposed on you by your habitat. . . but I digress.)

In a place like that, public transit is just doomed. There's no density of bus stops that will work. Either everyone lives at least a 10 or 15 minute walk from the nearest bus stop (possibly without even a sidewalk to walk on), or the stops are packed so densely that it's almost faster to walk than it is to take the bus, or the routes are packed so densely that the buses end up being a sort of hyper-expensive 4-passenger vehicle, on average. And you can just forget about any rapid transit options.