This keeps coming up, so I'm writing it up here so I can link to it.
Public transport in America is significantly less pervasive than in Europe and many other parts of the world. People often imagine that this is because America is less advanced. But the history is almost the opposite: America adopted a new technology (specifically, the automobile) earlier and faster and more enthusiastically than other countries.
Many Americans believe that the automobile was invented here. It wasn't; but the automobile assembly line, and with it mass production of motor vehicles, was. During both world wars, American industry, which already had quite a bit of experience mass-producing vehicles, supplied the allies with large quantities of military vehicles. Everyone knows about the planes and ships and tanks, but the factories also cranked out large numbers of military trucks and jeeps, because transporting troops and supplies is essential to any war effort.
Americans are often shocked to learn that during WWII, Germany, widely regarded as having been an industrial powerhouse at the time, was heavily reliant on horses for military transport. That feels like an anachronism to Americans; we associate military use of horses, with medieval cavalry, or with our mid-nineteenth-century Civil War, in which most of the soldiers had single-shot muzzle-loading rifles. We don't think of military horses and machine guns as belonging to the same era. (There were both horses and gatling guns in the Spanish American war, but our history classes tend to gloss over that one in a rush to get to WWI and WWII, which are considered more important.) It's quite weird to us that an industrialized country with the ability to make things like airplanes, would use horses in the military.
After WWII, we had a major economic boom. Most of Europe largely missed out on this, because a lot of their infrastructure had been bombed into oblivion, and they were still recovering, rebuilding. America didn't have to rebuild, and with all the soldiers back in the country to work regular jobs, production and income both rose. Many women continued to work outside the home, for the first time (on any kind of large scale) in our history during peacetime, and as a result, families now had two incomes and could afford more stuff than before. The factories turned their production to civilian purposes, and most American families purchased a number of things for the first time in this era: cars, major appliances, cameras, radios, etc. (Many families' earliest family photos are taken in front of the family car, because both were new.)
With so many American households owning cars, public support for building better roads skyrocketed, resulting in, among other things, the Interstate highway system. People often blame the interstates for causing America's love affair with the car, but it's really the other way around. Yes, there were politicians who had other reasons for wanting to build them, but they were able to get popular support because all the new car owners wanted better roads to drive on. Meanwhile, passenger railroads started losing customers left and right, until after a few years they started going out of business like it was going out of style. Yes, America *used* to have fairly pervasive passenger rail service. I live in a city of ten thousand people (called Galion) in central Ohio, that *used* to have passenger rail service, but it was discontinued in the late sixties or early seventies, because people weren't using it any more. Other cities in our area, exactly the same thing happened. Now, the nearest passenger rail station is an hour and a half away by car.
America didn't fail to build a public transport network. We *had* one, and we abandoned it because we didn't need it any more. You talk to Americans about passenger trains, and we think the nineteenth century called and they want their technology back.
Does this mean that widespread use of cars is inherently better than widespread use of passenger rail? Not necessarily. But cars are what America collectively chose, and there were and are reasons for that choice. It doesn't mean we don't know how to build a passenger rail network. We had one, and we stopped using it, mostly on purpose.
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