Another factor- driving in cars makes Americans less susceptible to terrorist attack AND Government control. When you can control the transit, the Government has its people in convenient, tight little boxes which can be coerced and/or terrorized. THIS is why Obama, Democrats, and other anti-American far-left extremist radical groups keep pushin for Public transportation.
Going to work from somewhere on the edge of a metro area - 'in the country' from the point of view of the urban rats is less desirable and sustainable than walking out of an approved high rise development with no parking spaces and taking a train to a wage slave / landless serf job. Mass transit means a lower carbon footprint according to the propaganda robots.
The UN plan called Agenda 21 now implemented through ICLEI at the community level makes this all so possible!
Most Europeans and American academics are clueless about the real meaning of land ownership. Brainwashing against land ownership is easy - it's too much trouble to own land! Why pay high and punitive property taxes! Too much hassle and work! Cheap, plentiful land for ownership by 'the common man' is nearly a thing of the past. $14,000 an acre for Nebraska farm land!
UN Agenda 21 wants to remove our land and put it back into the common pot so all can share what they don't own. This is the sales pitch made by bureaucratic carnies to the landless serf marks who know no better.
Private property rights keep US citizens farther from serfdom than Europeans. Landless serfs populate Europe and are clueless as to their fragile, urban, government sponsored straight jacket existence. Visualize a post nuclear THX-1138 dystopian world. This is the end goal of forced urbanization - mass transit by trains are just one stop along the way to a cattle car human urban existence.
Unelected bureaucrats are grabbing federal dollars to build trains and trollies in metro areas. Federal dollars are the crack cocaine of politics.