The problem is that America has few cities, in the European sense. Many of the newly-grown cities are just endless suburbs around a small downtown.

In a dense city like NYC, public transportation is the obvious choice. In a semi-dense city like Seattle, public transportation is a viable choice. In a nebulous agglomeration like LA, public transportation is hard to rely on.

People took 278 million trips on an LA Metro bus in 2019, which is more ridership than on any bus or rail system in the United States outside of NYC. We also have the most light rail ridership in the country. (but who cares about that?) Our public transit gets a really bad rap. It is certainly not as good as NYC or Chicago or, probably, Seattle, but maybe you could use Houston as an example in the future.

Thanks! I will :)

Good thing LA is nicer than I used to think.

I probably will be very wrong, but some places in Europe are urbanised over vast areas (in a sense making "endless suburbs") and to my knowledge have descent public transportation, usually a combination of trains, metros, busses, tramways.

In places like London, to my limited knowledge public transport is the only valid choice for transportation, as car traffic is in constant jam, parking is impossible to find and costs a fortune.

Countries like Belgium and Netherlands are highly urbanised and from my experience it's the same story - you do not take a car to go to work (if you work in the city/downtown). People even have jobs that they have in different cities and they take express trains everyday.

I agree though that US's suburban and car-centric model, with endless cul-de-sacs is not designed to have public transport. To retrofit public transport into this - is a colossal task, though it's also an effort to change peoples minds, that not relying on a car is "an attack on freedom" and public transport is not only for poor people.

Destroyed? No. It has to exist to be destroyed.

I've lived in two places with busses. One is my current location in Norway, and I don't need a car to do my everyday stuff. The other was in Indiana. You couldn't always get home if you worked second shift and you couldn't get home from the bar: they also didn't run on sundays.

Slightly more common were taxis (but I've lived more than one place without this as well). The taxis were never reliable in the US: For example, my car broke. I called the cab company, who told me that it was impossible to order a car ahead of time and they couldn't give me a decent time to call - waiting time could be anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours. As you can imagine, it makes getting to work or to a doctor appointment difficult - especially if you are stuck outside before they opened.

City to city public transportation just doesn't exist most places.

I think convenience is a big factor. With Uber you can press a few buttons in the app, be swiftly picked up, taken to your destination, and continue on with minimal fuss. With public transit you must figure out the best route, wait for the next scheduled pick up, usually make multiple stops between your pickup and destination, and likely arrive much later than if you took an Uber.

A lot of public transport networks these days have apps, including navigation support.