I fuck with this energy. I think I'll get this printed on a poster board.

America is super big and super stretched apart

Perfect for long-distance rail travel. Just get in the train, wait X minutes to get to the next town over, and get out. It's literally how the west was colonized in the second half of the 19th century.

What makes America bad for public transit isn't that the nation is spread out, it's that suburbs are a death knell with how spread out they are. I honestly don't think there's a way to make suburbs self-sustainable short of quadrupling the US' population so you can get decent density even there. Sort of like the SF Bay Area except actually building medium density housing instead of having >8 people to a low density home.

More realistically, the suburbs will probably have to be scrapped. It's not like those homes were built to last, anyway. Just don't replace them when they need to be condemned.

As for there not being enough greenery in cities, that's just a matter of choice, isn't it? Pedestrian boulevards can be lined with trees, building facades with ivy, public parks next to apartment blocks, etc. etc. Almost all the toxins in western urban areas today are from car tire dust and exhaust. Just ban motorized personal vehicles except mobility scooters and e-bikes, and most of what you seem to hate about urban areas can just go away.

America is stretched out, but that mostly referred to Alaska and everything west of the Mississippi and a narrow line of the Pacific ocean. Stick to east of the Mississippi or within 50 miles of the Pacific ocean and you find Americans are dense enough for good transit. However nobody builds good transit, and we are not dense enough to put up with bad transit.

Idk, I give the mayor a lot of shit, but he's a pretty alright dude. He's constantly out volunteering in the community to pick up trash or feed the homeless. He also rides our pretty poor bus network every day.

My last city was always quick to point out that the (poor) bus service was not profitable and didn't warrant any new investment.

But, the entire road system isn't profitable. Especially the cul-de-sac in front of your house. But we all agreed it was "worth it" for our taxes to fund thatq because of the obvious benefits of getting goods and people around the city.

Transit should be no different. A service we pay for through our taxes. Not a profit seeking business.

"Metro" literally can't run on regular roads. The specialised buses are too big to fit in normal lanes. It can only run on dedicated BRT routes. i.e., dedicated tracks.

But more so I'm just angry at the misleading marketing. It's an ok project with the wrong name. And other more substantial problems like already decreasing the promised frequency, giving up on level boarding and off-vehicle tap-ons. But it was the name that I was trying to highlight in my earlier comment.

Id be curious the surface area of those million population centers? Lots of the US is very spread out even for "cities" only the old cities on the East Coast have significant density.

Subways are pretty much exclusively built in the cities

Not just any city. Dense cities. Cities that are so densely populated that it would be /impossible/ for every person to move around in a car. Countless US cities are not even close to crossing that threshold. It just makes no sense to look at nationwide per capita on this. Only a city by city comparison of like with like population density is sensible.

(edit)
There is a baby elephant in the room that needs mention: US cities are designed with shitty zoning plans. They are designed so that each person on avg needs to travel more distance per commute to accomplish the same tasks (work and groceries). This heightens the congestion per capita. So ideally we would calculate daily net commute distance needed per capita plotted against subway track per capita for cities of comparable people per m². Which would embarrass US city mayors even more.