Public transportation doesn’t magically solve the problem. I live in the downtown of a midsized city, and the nearest grocery store is 5 miles away. Nearest hardware store 4 miles. In fact most of the business I frequent are between 4 and 10 miles away. I’m not walking to the bus stop, waiting for the bus, going 5 miles, turning a 10 minute drive into a 25 minute ride, getting several bags of groceries, and then waiting outside in the snow for the next 20 minutes for the next bus to come.

Now, I’ve lived in Chicago without a car, so I’m not against the idea in principle. But all the businesses I needed on a daily basis were available within a 15 minute walk from where I lived, and an EL stop was 10 minutes away. This is all possible because the population density is high enough to support businesses clustered in walkable neighborhoods.

In most of middle America, the population density is typically not high enough in an area to support these types of walkable communities. So everything is spread out, designed for communities with POVs.

It would take a massive redesign and rebuilding of communities for the public transportation thing to be viable.