Americans have really failed to capture and maintain a civic imaginary.
For the interested: http://data.seoul.go.kr/
It seems like every 5 meters there’s a bus stop, and the busses are not old style clunkers but double deckers like Googles take.
Returning to the US, it's car-culture and lackluster public transport was jarring.
The Transit app is also really useful for this.
It's just the public transit systems that need improvement, but the rider side isn't too bad.
I was excited to try this, but it seems broken. Every pair of locations I give it returns "No routes found", even for stops that are directly connected by a single bus route that I can see in its database.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransMilenio
Public transport as it should be, cheap, fast, reliable.
Then I went to Sydney in December. The public transportation system there is super impressive. You have a location-based app where you can tell you want to go from point A to point B (from an address, a click on the map, your favorites), it will instantly provide you with many options, with time, duration and price, showing you where to take it from.
It seems there are buses every 5 minutes. During the route the app will buzz you 2 and 1 stop before your actual stop. Oh, and the bus card allow you to take the light train and the ferry. You can also check your credits directly in the app, even recharge it I think.
It changed my perspective on how to use public transportation. In Los Angeles for example I would check which bus/train I should take, download the timetable to see the frequency and where to stop. In Sydney, I got confident in a way that I would just stop caring about planning first. Just open the app and it'll tell you how to go where you want to go.