As an American I had always heard that public transportation was super inexpensive in essentially all of Western Europe. Is that not the case generally?
It's hard to answer, it depends on a lot of variables, but it is rarely "super inexpensive", just usually cheaper.
On a trip basis, i.e. no fixed costs included, no reduction; public transports are often the most expensive form of transportation (when compared to car or plane for longer distances).
However, few people pay the full price, especially not those taking the train regularly, and cars have massive fixed costs. So if you can do everything with public transports and don't have a car, you can save a lot of money. If you still need a car for whatever reason but want to use public transports for some trips, then it can become the worst of both worlds (high fixed costs of the car plus high per trip cost of public transportation).
The car has one big advantage (in term of price), is that it can scale to a few people with basically no extra costs, whereas public transportation is usually linear. If you put four friends in your car and drive a few hundred kilometres to go on holidays abroad, the price of public transports will be ridiculous in comparison.
With "usually" being an important proviso: In Germany, there are weekend tickets for up to 5 people. A student ticket (covering the entire state, included in the tuition fee of around 700 EUR/year) often allows the holder to take someone along after 7pm or on weekends.
You're getting lots of different answers but as someone who's lived and traveled in several different countries in Europe, i can tell you that it simply depends.
In Belgium, it's obscenely expensive. In some others, it's super cheap. It depends how much the country cares about making their public transport accessible. Either way it's very inconsistent across Europe but yes there are countries where public transport is highly subsidized and truly cheap and accessible. Which IMO saves a lot of costs elsewhere, it's the right way to do it.
It used to be cheap. But prices have increased massively in the last decades. For example, in Stockholm the inflation-adjusted price has increased by over 200% since 2000. The price has increased much more than the price of gas which drivers complain about all the time. Politicians in Stockholm motivate raising prices with "well, it's still cheaper than in other cities so be happy!" But I suspect politicians in other cities use the exact same argument to raise their prices.
700€/year is about 60€/month, which is fairly typical for a regional monthly public transport pass. Considering we pay around 7 USD/gal for fuel (1.6€/l), if your work is more than about 30 car-minutes away it's cheaper to commute by public transit (assuming you park for free). And that's not even considering that you might be able to have fewer cars in the household: just owning the car is a lot more expensive than the transit pass.
Train travel in the UK is absurdly expensive unless you're willing to book a few months in advance and travel off-peak. Train travel in Spain is much better and cheaper. AFAIK in terms of price it mostly has to do with how much governments are willing to subsidise rail transport.
Sadly when there was a plane option instead - that always tended to be way cheaper (London to Scotland for example).
Personally I'd subsidise it more on less used routes just to push people out of cars more, sadly London commuter routes have kinda hit the wall in capacity ad legacy limitations of the old layout/station platform lengths, rail gauge, bridge heights etc of which much was planned for in an era 100 years ago.
No, not really. Public transport in the cities in the US that I've been to that had public transport (NYC, Chicago, DC, Seattle) cost about the same or less then I would expect to pay in most major European cities.
It's cheap relative to $2/liter fuel, huge taxes and registration fees on vehicles, parking, and so on. It's still scaled to the relative cost of living which can be high in major cities.
