Please, please do yourself a favor and visit places that aren’t the USA.
Cars are the worse product. They are extremely energy inefficient for moving a human from A to B, even if powered by electricity. They are vastly more expensive than alternatives, even if you threw caution to the wind and allowed for the cheapest possible construction. They pose astronomical externalities in the form of more and bigger roads, more and bigger road maintenance, parking, and injury and fatality through collisions.
They have utility, but the only reason they even remotely compete against bicycles and trains and scooters and buses and walking is because you’ve built 95% of the things you might ever want to go to ten miles apart.
Cars are a worse product in some ways and in a very limited number of situations, but cars are a much better product in many situations including some where public transportation is not a solution at all. The public transportation we have now is an objectively worse experience in the vast majority of places where it's available for almost every situation.
Public transportation can be improved to be better than it is and cities can be redesigned to make using public transportation easier, but until both of those things start happening, people will resist replacing all the good things cars offer with something that is much worse for them.
When car companies wanted to sell cars, they changed the roads and cities. The more they changed the roads and cities to make cars more attractive the more cars they sold. Cars already solved a lot of the problems people had, but car companies went even further to create many new problems that only their cars would solve. Making life worse for people without cars just to increase car sales was a dick move made by a bunch of assholes. Why is everyone so willing to make life worse for people with cars to sell public transportation now?
What we have now are people selling public transportation without bothering to change the roads and cities. There is no priority on making public transportation more attractive, instead the attention is all on how to make cars more painful to use.
Nobody has worked out how to get public transportation to solve the problems that only cars do currently. Nobody has addressed the problems that cause people to avoid public transportation. The entire attitude is basically "We're going to keep punishing car drivers until they put up with something far worse than what they have now so that maybe eventually we can have something better".
All the discussion is "take away parking" and "narrow the streets" and "charge drivers more money" but nobody is saying "We've made our public transportation systems clean, safe, pleasant, and dependable" or "No one ever has to wait more than 7 minutes at a station" or "We've expanded service to new areas and put in stations every three blocks"
It's true that in an ideal world we would be far less dependent on cars, but we'll never get there without making the alternatives more attractive and until that happens, punishing drivers is only going to piss people off and rightly so. It's a dick move.
Cars are the worse product. They are extremely energy inefficient for moving a human from A to B, even if powered by electricity. They are vastly more expensive than alternatives, even if you threw caution to the wind and allowed for the cheapest possible construction. They pose astronomical externalities in the form of more and bigger roads, more and bigger road maintenance, parking, and injury and fatality through collisions.
They have utility, but the only reason they even remotely compete against bicycles and trains and scooters and buses and walking is because you’ve built 95% of the things you might ever want to go to ten miles apart.