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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Public transport only really works in crowded areas. Pretty sure you can easily ditch your car and get around fine in NYC, but in Bumfuck, North Dakota, you are lucky to get a bus once a day.
The reasons for this include a high upfront set-up cost and mistakes in the past.
When public transport was planned out, the population was smaller and the roads were more empty. The current systems might have been sufficiently expansible at that time, but there is just so much traffic and overloaded infrastructure nowadays. In IT fields, you'd say that you have technical debt: you favored an easier solution without thinking about long-term maintainabilty and are now stuck at trying to refactor the mess you made.
And today, public transport also needs to be profitable, of course, which is nigh Impossible. The only way to solve it would be a public transport tax and theb you'll see most of the vocal supporterd fall.
Anecdotal point in case: I live in a rural area in Germany and a friend's dad always complained about how awful public transport is here. At one point, a party put up the suggestion to have a "tax" of 20 bucks per quarter, so public transport could be expanded and free to use for everyone. Friend's dad was furious about that suggestion because "I'm not using public transport, so why should I pay for everyone who does". People just like to complain, not solve the issue they're aggravated about.
You have this backwards. Areas become dense due to the presence of public transport, not the other way around. Infrastructure comes before population, not afterwards. This remains true even in car-world, because even drivers won't really travel where there's no meaningful roads to do so.
Bumfuck, North Dakota is Bumfuck, North Dakota specifically because of the lack of investment in transport, not because it "doesn't work". If Bumfuck convinced someone to pull a spur off of the old Great Northern Line that runs through northern ND, it might grow into something much larger.