[etempleton]

Americans don’t despise public transit. They despise poorly maintained / insufficient public transit. Outside of New York and San Francisco, public transit is really not sufficient to get you where you need to go.

Many cities could do better to have more robust public transit, but the reality is America is vast and people commute long distances regularly. The cost of deploying such vast amounts of public transit would be prohibitively expensive.

[eightysixfour]

> Americans don’t despise public transit. They despise poorly maintained / insufficient public transit. Outside of New York and San Francisco, public transit is really not sufficient to get you where you need to go.

I used to believe this, I'm not sure it is actually true though for a large percentage of Americans. There is some unmet demand that would be satisfied, but beyond that, most Americans value their individualism and control (even if it is controlling where a driver takes them via an app) too much unless they were raised around good transit. That means that even if we build good transit, it will probably take more than a generation for someone to use it fully and effectively.

[kyleee]

It also depends a lot on the culture of other riders. It takes relatively few undesireables to cause the preference to swing back to personal transport options