The problem is that as a passenger/consumer, with a car, it's very easy to decide how much to pay for my own personal level of ride quality.
I can spend $2k on an old Camry, or I can spend $200k on a Bentley, but either way, I have almost total control (potholes notwithstanding).
It's really not possible to have that kind of personal control when you're looking at public transit.
I use them just fine on my bicycle.
I agree with everything you say but you're missing a key point - the active hostility that a significant number of drivers have for bikes.
I biked in Canada for ten years, and drivers there (at the time) were mostly indifferent to bikes.
(And yet I say this, and then I remember that one of Canada's rising bike stars at the time was permanently paralyzed by a driver who had repeated tried to force him off the road before (in his small community) and who had been reported to the police many times for it, and yet suffered no penalty other than a temporary license suspension. This was in the early 80s, and I haven't thought about it in 30 years, but I still feel a rush of rage.)
Now I live in the Netherlands, and cars are actively solicitous of bikes. Let me tell you that the center of Amsterdam has a lot of cobblestone streets with no separation between bikes and cars, not even a line on the street, but (nearly all) the cars treat cyclists as if they are delicate and breakable, which is actually the case.
Cyclists keep getting promised the world around the country. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Some long distance trains you can pay for a private cabin with decent meal service, or just a single seat and access to a vending machine.
Wikipedia confirms that distinction is sometimes made.
If you can't bring yourself to solve your parking situation after spending 200k on a Bentley, you spent too much on the Bentley.
To this day, I've never seen a Valet Full sign.
US highways do pay for themselves <https://web.archive.org/web/20170712175437/www.rita.dot.gov/...>, and help pay for other modes of transportation. Transit receives the biggest subsidy per passenger-mile, with rail and airlines in between.
(For those wishing more detail: From the executive summary <https://web.archive.org/web/20170628114204/http://www.rita.d...>:
>*Highways*
>* Users of the highway passenger transportation system paid significantly greater amounts of money to the federal government than their allocated costs in 1994-2000. <https://web.archive.org/web/20170628114204/http://www.rita.d...> This was a result of the increase in the deficit reduction motor fuel tax rates between October 1993 and September 1997, and the increase in Highway Trust Fund fuel tax rates starting in October 1997.
>* School and transit buses received positive net federal subsidies over the 1990-2002 period, but autos, motorcycles, pickups and vans, and intercity buses paid more than their allocated cost to the federal government.
>* On average, highway users paid $1.91 per thousand passenger-miles to the federal government over their highway allocated cost during 1990-2002.)
The real costs are tied up in surface roads and what lies underneath them. Repaving, sewer, cable, electricity, drainage... all that stuff has to be replaced regularly, and when it does, it's a massive subsidy from the people who don't drive cars on those roads, to the people who live or drive heavy trucks on them.
Public policy should try to make people's lives better, not worse.
It is much better for 80% of the people living today and 100% of the people living 50 years from now who will be dealing with the devastation caused by our CO2 emissions.
There is no incentive to minimize construction and maintenance costs at all. No pay-as-you-go model like busses and trains have.