> "barely anything in the middle"

It's amazing how many people think this. There are metro areas in "the middle" with populations greater than European countries. And Texas, right in the middle, has a population that would put it at #10 in Europe.

   #3 Chicago 9.5 million
   #4 Dallas 7.4 million
   #5 Houston 6.9 million
   #14 Detroit 4.3 million
   #16 Minneapolis 3.6 million
   #19 Denver 2.9 million
   #21 St Louis 2.8 million

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...

The Chicago metro would be the 20th largest country in Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...

Let be kind to the GP and assume he meant "space between metro areas" rather than the simplistic "coastal and flyover" meme.

Look at Texas. 200 miles of between Houston and Dallas and Austin. This largely empty triangle itself is half the Texas population. But its barely 10% of the Texas area.

So yes. The US metros are isolated compared to Europe.

That isolation means that people travel to airports to go to other metro areas, rather than train stations like in Europe.

It doesn't explain the lack of transit inside the metros.

Metro population density is far more important.

Many of these cities were more densely connected by train stations prior to Europe's rail network, yet America's co-dependent dreams of the automobile and of flight derailed that and sold the rail network to the lowest bidder for terrible, slow cargo usage only.

Which absolutely does start to explain the lack of transit inside many of these metros: at the same time the rails were converted to mostly cargo only a lot of the suburban commuter lines were themselves "lost" to time or destroyed. It's utterly depressing to see the old passenger train maps in America and compare to what some of those passenger lines could be serving today if like Europe they'd been kept up/maintained.

A lot more of the suburbs in every American city than people realize were served by trolley and passenger train in their infancy that they grew around, and just because many of the lines have been "lost" over the years doesn't mean that their skeletons don't still show in the overall growth pattern. (Until you get into the entirely car-dependent exurbs and "suburbs of the suburbs", of course.)

America outsourced public transit to the lowest bidders, they got bored serving people directly and went with focusing solely on cargo, and people were too busy driving everywhere to notice what they lost.

US metro population density is low in most places that are not constrained by oceans or mountains.

Same with Canada, and yet Metro is better in most big Canadian cities than any I've been to in the U.S.

Aren't Canada's biggest cities along borders with rivers?

> It doesn't explain the lack of transit inside the metros.

That is because whites moved out and systematically starved the cities of a tax base and state funding for infrastructure projects that would benefit minorities.

How widely spaced are those cities though? US population density is 33 people/km^2 compared with 112 for the EU.

Far, but almost everyone does not commute outside their local city so I don't get your point.

> Our country is a lot bigger with barely anything in the middle

That's a positive for public transport, you can cover more people cheaper because almost everyone live in big cities.

Or maybe the fact our country is huge, and infrastructure cost is ghastly compared to say, all of europe. But sure, blame the voters.

This is an excuse for no transit options between metros, but not an excuse for no public transit inside the metros.