Americans hate transit because of the last mile problem. You know exactly how close my house is to light rail. I can walk there, take a bus to the train station and be downtown in about 45 minutes for around $4 round trip. I did exactly that to see lil down in the International district. But if I needed to get further than that? It starts sucking. There's a parts house downtown that I could stand to visit more often. In order to find parking my best bet is to wander into Target three blocks away, buy $15 worth of shit I don't need, then walk to the parts house, get what I came for, go back to Target and head home. OR I could walk down to the bus terminal, ride into the international district and walk another mile and a half. Or? I could spend an hour and a half on a bus each way, also an option. Because the bus from the International District to the Pike Place Market does not exist. So instead I pay $7 shipping from a place I can hit by car in 20 minutes. When I was in North Hollywood? I was a 10-minute walk to the Red Line, a 10-minute ride to Hollywood & Vine and a 10-minute walk to the Arclight. That made the Arclight pretty approachable. But public transit to LAX? three and a half hours. It was much better from Cypress Park - I was a 20 minute walk, a 20 minute ride and then hurry and catch that shuttle I have tickets for for a total of around 75,80 minutes. But the Arclight? two and a half hours.
Americans hate transit because it’s usually not a viable alternative to driving. Not always though - 65% is no joke. The first law of transit is that people will always drive unless transit / cycling is fast enough. If the travel time of transit is below 144% of that of driving, more than half of people will choose transit. Your 45 minute bus trip is a 26 minute drive (Maps tells me) so it’s just on that threshold. You’re totally right in assessing that for a lot of people and a lot of trips it’s garbage, because it just takes too fucking long and the bus doesn’t even go where you need it to go. The second law is that transit needs to do everything right to succeed, whereas cars need to suck real bad for people not to use them. That 144% assumes the transit system is working, people know how to use it, and it’s not just perceived as a plebeian can of sardines. I don’t buy that the geography of US cities prevents good transit, I just believe it’s transit on hard mode. Canada’s superb suburban bus networks prove that you can make a successful transit network even in car-dependent suburban hellscapes. That does require buses to be fast, to get priority and to have an agency and city that really get that. A friend and transit professional of mine objected to a pedestrian crossing that the city wanted to place, because that street saw 26 buses an hour each way and if you calculated the extra cost just in terms of paying bus drivers that €2000 of paint would cost the transit agency over €120K a year, let alone the time it asked for everyone riding it. So they didn’t.