I live in a city with very good public transport. My average tram trip is about 20 minutes, and there is usually one that goes directly to where I want to go. I live within a hundred meters of a tram stop - and this is far from unusual. I also live within a mile of a rail station, and there is a bus stop within a hundred meters.
As I see it, there are two intertwined problems: 1. American cities are built around the car. Homes are distributed across vast areas, in the form of suburbs. 2. Many cities have very bad public transport options. This makes cars more viable, despite the inherent inefficiency of what is essentially a road-train with a hundred drivers.
If you experience transport in the context of a society built around the car, then sure, a car is going to seem viable. Vast amounts of capital has gone into the system that makes it viable. Living and working patterns are all built around it. It doesn't change the fact that fundamentally, physically, a car takes more money to build, run, takes up more space to carry fewer people, requires more infrastructure - and, even given a network of roads vastly more comprehensive than any train or tram system ever designed, works very badly.
Suburbs are also horrible from an efficiency perspective.
We practically used to, until cars encouraged development to spread out.
> You have to completely rethink density and development patterns to get to a point where most origins and destinations are near stations.
In other words, go back to what the world was like before cars.
> Public transit has a wickedly hard problem to solve
But not impossible. European cities seem to have a less difficult time.
European cities had the good fortune to lock in a healthy level of density as "neighborhood character" thousands of years ago, so that the same sorts of structures Americans read as the rapacious excesses of a new era of unfettered capitalism and runaway inequality (i.e. 5-story apartment buildings) are instead seen as historic. They also aren't in a position of having to unwind the "mistake" of certain neighborhood communities existing.
>In other words, go back to what the world was like before cars.
The places we would invade to "go back" to, and the places we would abandon to "go back" from, are now all occupied by humans with voting rights and a preference for the status quo. Not to mention that the population is simply larger, and more concentrated in metro areas. The city centers abandoned during suburban flight were quickly claimed by low-income people of color, and also a bunch of extra people were born in (or migrated from farmland and small towns to) suburbia.
>We practically used to, until cars encouraged development to spread out.
The tenements of pre-car industrial cities were so traumatic that we still have the scar tissue today, in the form of wildly overbearing zoning and building codes. The Progressive movement's obsession with making sure buildings have enough light and air and open space, which holds back San Francisco from even European-level density today, is rooted in the outrage felt towards living conditions 100+ years ago, which the car saved us from.
Obviously there's a healthy middle ground and it's frustrating that we don't take it, but our culture has the memory of what it was like to live too close together, and quite likes the ability to spread out.
Because we don't all share an origin, destination, and schedule. Public transit can be extremely effective for the parts of the journey that it covers, but the extreme ineffectiveness of walking the other parts can cancel all that out. You have to completely rethink density and development patterns to get to a point where most origins and destinations are near stations. That would take decades even if we wanted to do it, and SB827 was just defeated in California. Then you have to run trains frequently enough that schedules don't matter. That's expensive as hell and the necessary capital projects take decades. And even if you do them, they might deteriorate and regress later if you don't keep up with the maintenance (see: New York).
When I lived in Berkeley, BART covered 90% of my commute distance, station to station, in 25 minutes. My actual end-to-end commute time was over an hour, basically a wash compared to taking an Uber over the Bay Bridge at rush hour. Bicycling to my local station got it down to maybe 50.
25 minutes is an entire commute the average American. Being just 1.5 miles away from a station doubled that. Public transit has a wickedly hard problem to solve - even 90% coverage is still next to useless.