It's not that public transit is bad, it's that if you try to make car travel worse without providing people with a viable alternative to it, you will lose at politics. And just sticking a bus lane in there doesn't provide an alternative unless the bus comes at short intervals to the places where people actually travel, which isn't compatible with the geography of most American cities, because at least one of the endpoints will be in the suburbs which lacks the density for viable mass transit.

Unfortunately we built those suburbs without factoring in the real cost of transporting people to and from them. Now those homeowners are real used to that transportation subsidy and are not happy when it is threatened to be taken away. Something is going to give, cities can’t afford it any more.

Plenty of suburban homeowners like myself are happy to never have to go into the city and have been granted this due to work from home. I personally haven’t been downtown in like 6 months. A large percentage of the population who commute to city centers from the suburbs for jobs are probably working office jobs that could be done remotely. The ulterior motives I’ve heard for RTO are that commercial real estate prices are plummeting and city revenues are plummeting because of lack of workers. If that is the case then aren’t the suburbs subsidizing the city?