[Nullabillity]

Public transport is never going to provide a comprehensive point-to-point network, and every switch dramatically increases the cost (in terms of time, effort, and finances). The only way it can be remotely viable for commuting is if your city is organized into a hub-and-spoke model where everyone commutes into the same city core.

But that gets you very congested stations (great for occasions like COVID!), and is murder for a city's social life (since you're more than doubling the cost of visiting friends). I know, because I live in a city^Hhellscape designed like this...

Bikes, you say? Well, my old 20km commute took around an hour by ebike, around twice the time of the car. And that was an unpleasant experience in the best case, that got virtually unviable with weather (rain, leaves, ice, whatever else). And again, unviable for socializing since nobody I'm visiting is going to have an ebike charger (nor is it guaranteed that I'd be staying there long enough for it to work).

[bluGill]

Public transit can be organized much better than that. There need not be one hub in a city for example. Sure it will never cover 100% if all cases well, but it can cover enough to get the majority of the people to not have a car at all.

Most of the leaders of transit systems are not interested in good transit though. (The exceptions don't speak good English from what I can tell )

[Nullabillity]

> There need not be one hub in a city for example.

That's not a solution, that's just moving to another point on the continuum between the downsides of hub-and-spoke and the downsides of point-to-point.

And this kind of hub bifurcation typically only serves to make residential-to-residential journeys even worse, setting up social barriers based on which hubs people have easy access to.

> The exceptions don't speak good English from what I can tell

Can't really respond to this if you're not interested in citing which "good" example you'd like to see emulated.

[bluGill]

the ultimate spoke location is a grid system with hubs every block, and a larger grid with express stoos every few blocks, with a still larger grid... no city in the world comes close to the population to support that.

Mass transport is a compromise to serve the masses well, but there are always losers in the compromise. Residential to residential is general the hardest to serve because other land uses value the easier to get to places far more.

There are many different cities with different constraints. They have pick different answers to the compromise. South Korea, France, Japan, and Switzerland just to name 4 very different systems that are fairly good. Each have things to learn from each other.