I’m 25 and I don’t have a drivers license. I mean, I’ve never really felt the need to go and get one. Public transport is usually the fastest option where I live, and it takes a lot less responsibility to use it.
But most people would still prefer driving, rather than using the public T. Why?
For north america it’s an issue of lower population density, a significant issue in most Canadian cities and mid size and lower American cities. Europe usually has higher density and better investment. Most cities can’t justify running frequent bus services in those areas which means people want to drive and thus fewer people use the bus and the buses get scaled back or removed. I’ve lived at both ends of this. Most cities aren’t willing to spend the money in the hopes that ridership catches on. I lived in a city of a million that had only 2 train lines. If you were lucky and lived right on it and worked right on it great. Otherwise every trip became insanely long. Many feeder buses were every 30 minutes, so you ran into a schedule issue there, then you had to get to the train, and possibly wait 15-20 minutes for it. Get to where you were going, get off and wait for the every 30 minute bus going out to where you needed to be and ride that.
Even if you left right when the bus was coming, you’d be looking at 15 minutes to the station, waiting up to 20 minutes depending on how the wind blew, riding say 25 minutes to your destination (already at 1 hour) then getting off waiting for possibly up to 20 minutes for the other bus, and then another 20 minutes out to where you were going. Possibly 90 minutes, vs 30 minutes in a car, and you could leave when you wanted to.
If the train time didn’t exactly line up, you might end up leaving 2+ hours before work started, vs leaving 45 minutes before while driving.
That’s all a valid critique, but…I struggle to see how your explanation is that it relates to “population density”. We are talking about the cities, not trying to put trains in Montana farmlands.
In fact, within urban/suburban areas, the point of population density mostly relates to…investments. Because each home and commercial strip is separated by two miles of four-lane roads, parking lots, and clover highway on-ramps, everything is more spread out; hence, less density. So I feel like a lot of people disagree on which end of the chicken-and-egg explanation. America is big, and has areas that will never be covered by transit, but that’s not an explanation for why out-of-car transit is terrible in its urban centers. It’s generally caused by poor decisions in infrastructure investment.
Because suburbs aren’t very dense. you have much longer bus runs to pick up fewer people. Some cities don’t want to spend money on it. Not every part of every city is like downtown New York.