There once was a time we built rail first and the cities appeared along it. The early rail capitalists knew that transit seeds development and that's what built MOST of the major cities in the Americas. Somehow we forgot that and have instead come to believe that transit only makes sense if it connects dense, fully-developed places that already exist. It's insipid, but unfortunately makes it past peoples' bullshit filters routinely. It's just part of the trend of cities in North America to give no shits about their future development.

It's total bullshit, though. Most city downtowns can justify small transit easily. Play with the Tom Forth tool and see for yourself. I recommend looking at bus stops per capita for any place you click; that tells a hell of a story about how over or underinvested a community is in car infrastructure. In most of the world, it's something like 200-400 people per bus stop in a city. In the US, you're lucky to see 1200 outside of a few edge cases.

The fact is, most trips are within a few miles of home. There's a lot of space in the world for cars. They're needed to fill in the edge cases. The truly rural areas. The niche needs of a profession. An unusual living situation, or to provide accessibility, or for so many other reasons. But the default should be transit and bike-ped, as it was for virtually all of human history and as it still is for most people in most cities in most of the world.

When we entertain this "The US is too big for transit" stuff, we're reversing the victim and offender and substituting the solution with the problem. To start with, intercity transit isn't even that important a kind of transit. It's useful and nice, but the kind of trips that happen within a few miles of home are the fundamental ones.