Seattle (and ?) Public Transportation

Why do we struggle with mass transit in the US? Could it be what I like to call our John Wayne attitude? Much of Europe has lived cheek-to-jowl in crowded cities for a thousand years. Cities like Berlin, Rome, and Paris were all established as walled cities. People are jammed in with retail stores on the ground floor and apartments above. The density is like four people per square yard. They live with, breathe, and smell their neighbors daily.
Once Columbus mistakenly found the New World, thinking it was India, England, France, and others started disgorging themselves of misfits, criminals, and troublemakers, sending them off to this wilderness halfway around the world. These "pilgrims" arrived to find these wide open spaces devoid of civilization if you ignore those pesky indigenous folks.
The next thing you knew, many of them were heading into the wilderness to stake out their forty acres and post it as "Private Property! Trespassers will be shot!" We became a nation of anti-social isolationists with guns. Sure, a few folks who had no survival skills and were frightened to death of being eaten by a bear stayed back on the East Coast and built cities that resembled what they had in the old world, but by and large, we became a nation of individualists who weren't about to be fenced in. I tend to call this the John Wayne syndrome.
The Industrial Age forced a lot of us into cities to find work, but we still fled to the suburbs for our little home in the country, away from the low-life's and vermin that frequented city streets. Of course, everyone did that, so the suburbs became a warren of tract homes and strip malls. We still convinced ourselves we were free and commuted to the city and back in our cars. Most of us returned home in the evening to hide in our suburban homes, ignoring most of the people living around us.
More importantly, we traded our horse, that we used to ride wildly over the hills with the wind in our face, for a car that we drove around with the wind in our face. We were still free to go where we wanted when we wanted, and with whom we wanted. The idea of being cooped up in a rolling box with a bunch of stinky strangers was appalling, to say the least.
Now, the city planners want us to give up our freedom and our cars and take public transit that will only go where they want it to go. It's inflexible, confining, and the opposite of freedom. You don't just decide on a whim to take a detour to pick up a carton of milk. You can jump off at the next stop, assuming it's near a store, but the bus or train will go on without you, and you get to wait, possibly in the heat, rain, or snow, for the next one that will most likely drop you a good distance from your final destination.
Back to those European cities that were built vertically, not horizontally. With the density of people in those cities, you can build a mass transit system with a stop every four or five blocks, and chances are there are 10,000 people living in that small area who will use your system to get around town. We've used the Paris system, and it's fantastic.
Most of the US was not built that way. We are a horizontal society. The cost to convert our cities into something compatible with mass transit is nearly impossible, not to mention most people don't want to live in the city in apartments or condos. We want our yards and garages and backyard barbecue. Build skyscrapers and try convincing a majority of almost ten million Angelenos to move into the Los Angeles downtown area. Or maybe you can sell that to the Texans in Dallas. The cost would be horrendous, and you'd probably have a ghost town.
In some of the most successful public transportation cities, public transportation is little more than a blip. This chart from https://www.statista.com/chart/25129/gcs-how-the-world-commutes/ makes my point.