Gonna chime in with the "why" that goes unspoken (except for on The Site Which Shall Not Be Named, where they are quite vocal), as far as public support goes: poor people and minorities. That is, the middle class, upper middle class, and elite who are influential enough to make-or-break these projects (usually by killing them with a number of phone calls, emails, dinner conversations, and lawsuit) are either afraid of poor people and minorities and don't want to ride public transit with them, or else don't want to give them a "free lunch" (never mind that the realities of car dependency mean that these people are actually subsidizing the complainers, by having to put a large portion of their own income into maintaining the means of transportation by which they get to the businesses that enrich the wealthy).

And, yes, I know, I know, the source; however, the consistency of their (incredibly profane and offensive) sentiments, squared with the ongoing reality of our public transit systems (SIDS: Sudden Infrastructure Death Syndrome), leads me to believe that there's a non-zero chance that they're merely expressing a more crass version of a shared belief among the more well-off and less incel-adjacent.

I post this not to inflame, but to raise an issue that has to be addressed in order to make these things happen. Not poor people and minorities, but the irrational attitudes towards any public good that is perceived as benefiting them. I dunno if you have to solve racism/classism, or merely convince the top 20% that public transit is a benefit to them, too, but you're going to have to do something wrt this matter if you want to see improvement in public transit infrastructure in this country (and preferably before a multi-billion-dollar quasi-FSD boondoggle ends up in the federal budget).