I'm just commenting on why people consider having a car a necessity in the U.S.; the reasons for it are more complex. Population density is one reason, but infrastructure planning and preferences is a big part of it. Most Americans live in the populated parts of the country in or near a city, not in rural Nevada or Nebraska, so those huge expanses on their own don't make public-transit impractical (they do complicate intercity rail, but that's a different issue).

Urban sprawl does make things more difficult, but doing better than the current state would still be quite possible in many cities. For example, taking the two most recent cities I've lived in, Houston and Copenhagen have closer population densities than people may think in the majority of their commute basin. If you draw a circle with radius roughly 30 km from each city's downtown, both have a density of about 1,000/km^2. Yet Copenhagen has 5 commuter rail lines, a subway, and an extensive 24-hour bus network, while Houston has 3 light-rail lines and a pretty bad bus network. So of course it's harder to get around in Houston without a car, even in the dense parts (for example, it's a huge pain to get from a high-rise condo in the Galleria area to an office building downtown, even though these are both dense areas and only about 15km apart). Houston is slowly improving in the past 10 years, though.

"Most Americans live in the populated parts of the country in or near a city, not in rural Nevada or Nebraska"

Yes, that's true ... but they only just got there. They, or their parents likely grew up in a much more rural, sparser population density.

So in the same way that it's going to take a generation or three to convince folks not to eat as much as a farmer needs to eat to do manual labor all day, it will also take a generation or three to convince folks that they don't need to start an engine to run every errand.

much of american habits, beliefs and culture are heavily derived from rural farming life.

It's a complex issue, but I see American car culture as much more recent and derived from suburbia, rather than from rural farm life. Very few people in the era when the majority of Americans were farmers had cars, because they were very expensive, and patterns of daily life didn't involve driving the kinds of distances to big freeway strip malls that you see today (neither freeways nor strip malls existed). The family may have had a tractor which was sometimes used to drive into town or a bigger city (or a horse was used instead), but driving daily to the Super Wal-Mart is a post-urbanization trend.

It's anecdotal, but certainly none of the farming background in my family involved car culture. My great-grandfather lived in a small farming town in Kansas, and they didn't own a car. The town, despite being small, was very centralized around a compact "main street" where all the shops were in walking distance of each other, pretty typical of any Midwestern town prior to WW2. People who lived outside of town either rode into town on a horse, took a tractor in, hitched a ride in, or walked. If they needed to go longer distances, they used this method to get to the nearest town with a train station, and took the train. They bought a car when? When they moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s. The rise of car culture and suburbia also led to most of these traditional compact farm towns turning into what you see today, with old downtowns are that are abandoned or semi-abandoned, replaced by a string of strip malls on the bypass freeway—a bypass freeway that in most cases was built in the 1950s or '60s, well after most Americans lived in cities.

'Most of the US' is rural, if you weight by area. But most people live in suburban areas, which are dense enough to support public transit if they weren't designed in such a pedestrian-hostile fashion.

> suburban areas, which are dense enough to support public transit

Primary reason my coworkers support public transportation, according to them, in an area with pretty good transit (especially for people who commute during "normal" hours): "I want the buses and trains to be good so everyone else will take them and get off of my roads."

At least people who think like that are supporting public transit! It's far better than the (sadly) more common thought-pattern of "I don't use it, so I won't vote to fund it".

But you could get the same result, much quicker, by levying tolls so high that rush hour looks like 9pm. Then commutes would be quick, but must people could only afford to go by bus.

Edit: and I dare say people might prefer that after a thorough CBA since it might mean paying $10/day for some private bus service but also saving an hour in commute time while also being able to use the commute to get something else done. But the prospect of tolls that high and riding a bus have a big "ick" factor for a lot of people, so...

too much fascination with light rail pretty much indebted most transit authorities to large bonds to pay off and very high maintenance cost. All that money would have been better spent on improved bus services but unfortunately trains are "sexy" whereas buses get a bad rap; loser cruiser and so on.

Post WW2 government programs encouraged vets and similar to move to the suburbs and highway programs gave way to a very strong automobile industry.

The top it off with more restrictive zoning laws in the US, where compared to Europe you much much less likely to see mixed use of land. in the US land zoned residential is usually kept well separated from industry which does add in commute times and needs for alternative transportation. Throw on that fuel and car taxes have always been cheap

You're missing the point entirely, and it has nothing to do with public transit. Although smaller overall, do you not think that Germany has rural areas? They do, lots of them.

Just by virtue of the fact that you live in the middle of nowhere, should not give you the right to pilot a several ton metal box going 100+kph that has the ability to kill you and those around you.

Driving should still be seen as a privilege and something that you have to earn, not just "oh, you live in the countryside.. well, do as you please"

I never argued it was a right. In fact, I totally agree with you -- it is a privilege. One that should probably be revoked or at least enforced.

Most of the U.S. may be rural by land area, but the overwhelming majority of the population in the U.S. is urban. 80.7% are urban as of the 2010 Census.

Define urban, please. At what population density is something "urban" vs. "rural"? The Phoenix metro is /huge/, but much of it is considered to be "rural" by the locals there because it doesn't come even slightly close to the density of a real city like SF or NYC.