You never went to western Europe or rich Asian countries ? You should try it and see for yourself.

I have, and everywhere people use public transit, it’s far more expensive or tedious to use a nice, big car. The houses, driveway, garage, and parking situation are inferior to those of 90% of the US, where you can easily take a Ford F150 or full size SUV almost anywhere you want.

Cars need space. Walking and bicycling (and public transit) need density. The environment for optimizing for each of those is completely opposite.

And once a person has invested in a car (the car itself and a home with enough space to store the car), and they use that car on a daily basis to commute to work or drop the kids off at school, they will be very unlikely to support taxes to pay for public transit, something they will almost never use, since they are already leaving the house in a car, they are going to do all their errands while out in a car.

Weirdly the Dutch take the train plenty and also have lots of cars

And also have the best bike infrastructure in the world. I wonder how the average car miles driven per year compares between the Netherlands and, say, the US.

You also need law and order. Years ago living in Toronto, I stopped taking transit when the crazies started getting on the train along with the innocent commuters.

There is evidence all around the world that this is not true.

Making driving way more expensive takes care of that.