I have a friend from Europe who thought America was foolish for not investing heavily in rail transportation. Then she came here and found out that America is too big to move everyone where they want to go by train. However she does say that a lot of places in Europe are effectively off limits to people who don’t own or rent a car.
People can be amazingly foolish regarding transportation, I read an essay once that was written by some professor who thought he was demonstrating his brilliance when he said that no product that people really needed required advertising. He claimed that cars only needed to be advertised because, “No one needs a car”. I thought it demonstrated an astounding ignorance of reality in modern America to think that people who work for very low wages spend large portions of their meager income to buy used cars that they really have no need for. I figured such an article could only be written by someone who has spent his entire life living in the inner part of some huge city. It makes no more sense than saying that people didn’t need horses or mules in 1850.