> But this doesn't seem to have any relationship to daily life where I am, or similar places, because train or plane rides are for going on long trips, say over 200km.

Which seems to suggest you live somewhere without a well developed rail system.

I grew up in Norway - a country with a population density of ~14 or so people per square km. Only 8 US states (Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, New Mexico, Nebraska, Nevada) has a lower population density. But yet, like in the US, most of the population live in much denser conurbations.

What is different from the US is that most of these people as a result also live along rail corridors that makes rail competitive with or faster than driving as the commuting option for a large proportion of the population.

> Maybe by a "well developed rail system" you mean a subway, but it doesn't seem realistic for an area with a million or two people to support one.

Oslo has a light rail/subway system with a population of 673k in the city itself and 1m in the urban area, or 1.6m in the metro area (though the latter includes towns well outside of Oslo proper separated from the city by forest in many cases).

The London suburb I live in has a tram system that is grade separated along substantial parts of the network, for a population of about 400k.

> Indeed, to travel to NYC from where I live by train would be the same time as driving, and considerably quicker than a bus. But no way would I ever spend about 2.5 hours daily going back and forth, so it's all unrelated to my normal transportation needs.

And yet large cities like NYC does have commuter belts that stretch out that far. E.g. London as well - the typical Londoner commutes an hour each way, and about 70% of journeys happen by public transport, because car largely is not competitive unless you happen to live in really odd locations relative to were you work.

But smaller towns do as well - my London suburb attracts commuters by rail from similar distances away, some in fact coming by rail through London from the other side.

But many people commute in to London from 2h+ away - the first trains to arrive in towards London from the South Coast in the mornings are always full of commuters.

Of course London does have the advantage of significant density.

But this was true even when I lived in Norway - trains in to Oslo in the early morning brought in long range commuters, and then filled up by people like me travelling "only" 20-30m from a nearby small low density town, because taking a bus to the local train station and the train in was competitive with car unless you live 20-30+ minutes by bus away from the nearest train station, in which case you'd be living in the middle of the wilderness.

Which of course is possible, but the proportion of the population that is true for even in Norway with it's extremely low population density, is extremely low - even in the US states with lower population density, most of their population is concentrated in relatively dense conurbations.

The point being that once you actually develop rail networks out to those kind of locations, people start using them over time - this is true in the US too - a whole lot of US towns grew out of development around the rail rather than being somewhere that existed prior to rail. Once you then add feeder bus routes utilization tends to go way up, as it takes away the day parking problem.

This whole "the US is just too big" thing just doesn't make any sense, because as you point out, most people have a clear limit on how far they want to commute, and if you parcel up the US similarly based on commuting centres and a ~1h travel radius around them, you cover the vast majority of the US population in regions that are for the most part more dense than many places with perfectly fine rail networks.

Nobody is suggesting rail, or light rail/subways or buses will be viable for absolutely everyone, but as someone who has lived somewhere with population density well below the US average without a car, I'll tell you that it seems weird to you because you have a century of no policy of trying to create an integrated transport system most places.