The US is ten times more dense than Australia. And yet Australian cities tend to have comparable if not better transit than similarly sized American cities. The overall population density of a country is largely irrelevant in this discussion because 99% of day to day travels are contained within the same metro areas.
Yes, but Australian, (and Canadian, and New Zealand) cities are all in the same range as many similarly sized American cities. Maybe Auckland has transit as good as Seattle with half the population, but it's not the order of magnitude difference that US vs European or US vs Asian cities do. All of the Anglo settler-colonies have rather lackluster transit compared to the Old World, and one of the first things I tell anybody who wants to come to New Zealand is to plan on having a car.
Whole the us has different numbers, but the same point applies. Most of the people in the US live in dense enough areas. The Mid west has similar size and population as France for example.
Dude, Australia is like 95% sand and nothingness with Alice Springs in the middle. Where is your bullet train between Perth and Darwin and Melbourne? Boo!
I jest, but not completely. The US is more dense but more distributed too. You can’t realistically link someone in a rural West Virginia holler up to a regular bus schedule, nor can you build a train between Morgantown and Pittsburgh that gets ridership.
America doesn’t do badly at public transit in places like Florida where private companies can fill the gap and the communities are within a reasonable distance and the geography is flat and simple. See the Brightline trains for proof of concept. But it’s kind of ridiculous to imagine Australia and the US to be comparable in that way.
