Public transportation is one of those 'if you build it they will come' type of things. But as it requires massive, long-term infrastructure investments that disrupt the city and can bankrupt companies or even municipalities if it goes wrong, it's usually built in a subpar manner on a small scale trying to fit into an existing city, and then tries to iterate on that every few years by scaling it up and modernising it while having to work with old permanent structures. So a lot of public transport really sucks, either they're buses that are less flexible than your car but adhere to the same space and speed limits, thus making a car a better idea, or they're small rail projects that don't get much coverage or frequency.

But now imagine the corollary... a city with just small sidewalks, bicycle lanes and public transportation lines, and absolutely 0 roads for cars, and no real local car industry. Now imagine the cost of breaking down buildings, laying massive amounts of road, manufacturing new cars and teaching everyone to drive. It'd be just as tricky.

There's nothing inherently wrong with public transportation but implementing it right into existing cities isn't trivial. It's supported so much because we long for a good implementation, public transportation done right is cheaper, more efficient, reduces congestion, improves equality & access to affordable transport, is safer and more environmentally friendly, while also giving all of its occupants the ability to do something else than paying attention to not getting into an accident. We long for that and support public transportation not because it's so fantastic but because it could be better than what we have, and should.

It's not like that everywhere. Take Belgium for example, expanded its infrastructure and its public transport use doubled between 2000 and 2012, doubled (!) in half a generation. Beijing's subway alone, a city of 12 million, delivers around 9m trips per day, forget the bus lines. There's already a ton of congestion, the mass transit system is hugely popular and hugely important.

Anyway I feel it's distinctly an American (and say an Australian) issue. Most of the developed world (take Europe or say Japan) consists of very dense urban areas, and a whole bunch of nothing. The US is like that, too, but there's still a ton of urban sprawl and even extremely urban areas like LA have lots of low-density living. Public transport's economics are essentially usage / investments, and building infrastructure to reach large areas of low-density (and thereby low-usage) living is not really worth the expenses. So you get this sub-par network where you have to wait half an hour for a bus that takes you to the centre where you have to move to a different one, it just isn't feasible. But take New York City, 8 million people and more than 5 million daily trips on the subway alone. It's extremely well used and hugely important, just like it is in Beijing, or in London or Paris. I've either visited or lived in all those places and the subway was indispensable, a part of life. But most people in the US or say Australia don't live in density like that.

Anyway the article felt a bit thin... It spends about an entire page on the notion that 'despite a half-cent sales tax increase to pay for transport [doesn't mention this money goes to both public and non-public transport and isn't necessarily always earmarked, either] public transport actually declined by half a percentage point'. I mean that's not analysis, it's just a tiny little fact that could mean anything. Again, for one we don't know how those funds are spent. And secondly, those funds may be a tiny fraction of the necessary budget for maintenance and scaling infrastructure with a growing population.

Anyway I think self-driving cars will nail public-transportation first. The type of investments necessary to set up rail, tram, rain or even bus service aren't trivial, but a fleet of self-driving cars and people inside working in privacy and comfort on their laptops in comparison is. For new cities, or countries where insane projects can still get done without decades of bureaucracy (I'm looking at you Beijing metro line) massive public transportation is a huge deal. But trying to reinvent the American city to accommodate public transport (and cycling infrastructure) done right (which in a dream world would entail destroying a city like LA and magically spawning a denser version of it in its place so that public transport works), in the context of American politics... I give self driving vehicles a much better shot of working around that problem.