I ride the bus and I can promise you I don't do it because of luxury. Even if that was true, it would only be true in North America. In the rest of the developed world, public transport extends out into rural areas.
Yeah, if by "extends out" you mean "you can get there, eventually". Not if you mean "you can get there in a reasonable amount of time and you don't need to time it perfectly because you only get two chances a day".
>In the rest of the developed world, public transport extends out into rural areas.
I have spent a lot of time in Europe and, once you get away from population centers and even larger towns, public transit can get very hit or miss. OK, maybe there's technically a once or twice a day bus to that rural hamlet but lots of Europeans own cars and, while it's generally easier to get by without cars in areas of Europe, it's not like you can hop on public transportation everywhere.
It varies of course. Somewhere like Switzerland (as another poster notes) is generally easier to get off the beaten track by bus or train than a lot of coutries.
Switzerland has villages with only hundreds of people that regularly receive train service. There are states with similar GDP, size and density as Switzerland that do not have any train service. Don't think of the US as a whole, think of the individual states who easily have the budget equivalent of European countries.