Are you confused as to why people would prefer to be in charge of their own transportation and set their own schedule instead of being at the whims of whatever forces that might cause buses & trains to be delayed, cancelled, rerouted, full, etc.?

When I lived in a city with good transit, biking and then taking the bus was more reliable than driving to work. Driving puts you at the whims of traffic and construction, some of which may or may not be forecastable.

Did you live in one of those cities where they had the flying buses? Because otherwise you're just as much, if not more, at the whim of traffic and construction on a bus. A car will always be faster and more reliable than a bus. subways and local trains usually only beat cars because they're often on a closed loop where they don't have to stop. Plenty of trains have issues though, like the city I used to live in who shut down the trains downtown every single holiday weekend (downtown was the transfer point). A bike might be reliable on short distances where there is heavy traffic if you have dedicated bike lanes where you can avoid that traffic.

The problem comes if your city doesn't have total subway coverage and you have to take a bus to a subway, take a subway, take a bus from the subway, driving will always win.

Biking can quite often take you around traffic; in some cities, there are bus lanes that allow them to go around traffic too. Even just the ability to get off the bike and walk it up a one-way street can sometimes get you around some annoying obstacles.

Though it was hardly scientific, Top Gear once raced a car against three other forms of transit, the key being they had to go through the center of London during rush hour. First place was a bicycle, Second place was a boat, Third place was public transit, Fourth place was the car.

The vast majority of the plane isn't driving through the center of London to get to work. In North America a lot of people are coming from the subburbs to somewhere else. Let's look at the scenarios a lot of people deal with.

You take one bus near your house to your work

You live near a train station and you work is near a destination station

You are within reasonable biking distance and aren't going to end up a sweaty mess by the time you arrive

You can't do 1 or 2 because a single route won't get you there and you may need additional transfers/long walks to get there.

1-3 are usually fine for commuting. Assuming you don't need a vehicle to run errands, transport anything big to and from work, etc.

4 is the scenario for most people and why cars are popular. If I can walk out my front door to a bus stop, and get dropped off right beside work, a bus is great. if I walk 15 minutes to a stop, wait for a bus, take an inefficient route in the general direction of my work, get off, wait for a transfer (could be 5-15 minutes depending on the city/route) then take another inefficient route only arrive at my office in 2-3x the amount of time it would have taken to drive there, I'm driving. Most people don't seem to realize that most places don't have the awesome transportation system of a New York City, London, or some places like Seoul or Tokyo.

As the cities get smaller, the transportation gets worse. I grew up in a city that had 1 bus on every route. it would go by every stop once an hour. It was really awful as a system especially if you had to transfer. It wasn't just a matter if living near a stop and having work near a destination stop, you also had to see if the bus time lined up with your work time. Otherwise you'd be there an hour early and maybe have to stay an hour late. If you live in some European or Asian cities that have really good public transit, or one of the very few north american ones that do, and your work and house line up just right, it makes sense for you, but for most it doesn't.

I think a few others have mentioned how about 80% of the population, at least of the USA, lives in urban areas. So yes; generally the vast majority of people ARE traveling through heavily settled areas to get to work.

Everything you're saying about 1-4 is pretty much correct; and that's why in the end, I don't blame most in the US for not waiting an hour for a bus going to a train. But 4 isn't so often because it's "impossible/impractical" to set up public transit for that area; it's just that that area has, perhaps foolishly, invested more into cars, 4-lane roads, and parking lots than good bus/train systems, cycling lanes, and pedestrain areas. In the US cities that get it right (not so many, I'll admit), it's a really good experience, even taking a bike through large areas. Plus, the advent of smartphones helps people get to buses on time with minimal waiting.

Yesterday, I was headed somewhere, saw on my phone that a taxi would take 15 minutes to arrive, said "fk no, that's too long" and biked to a subway stop. Given that it was rush hour, the trip was faster than if I'd taken a taxi.

For north america it's an issue of lower population density, a significant issue in most Canadian cities and mid size and lower American cities. Europe usually has higher density and better investment. Most cities can't justify running frequent bus services in those areas which means people want to drive and thus fewer people use the bus and the buses get scaled back or removed. I've lived at both ends of this. Most cities aren't willing to spend the money in the hopes that ridership catches on. I lived in a city of a million that had only 2 train lines. If you were lucky and lived right on it and worked right on it great. Otherwise every trip became insanely long. Many feeder buses were every 30 minutes, so you ran into a schedule issue there, then you had to get to the train, and possibly wait 15-20 minutes for it. Get to where you were going, get off and wait for the every 30 minute bus going out to where you needed to be and ride that.

Even if you left right when the bus was coming, you'd be looking at 15 minutes to the station, waiting up to 20 minutes depending on how the wind blew, riding say 25 minutes to your destination (already at 1 hour) then getting off waiting for possibly up to 20 minutes for the other bus, and then another 20 minutes out to where you were going. Possibly 90 minutes, vs 30 minutes in a car, and you could leave when you wanted to.

If the train time didn't exactly line up, you might end up leaving 2+ hours before work started, vs leaving 45 minutes before while driving.

That’s all a valid critique, but…I struggle to see how your explanation is that it relates to “population density”. We are talking about the cities, not trying to put trains in Montana farmlands.

In fact, within urban/suburban areas, the point of population density mostly relates to…investments. Because each home and commercial strip is separated by two miles of four-lane roads, parking lots, and clover highway on-ramps, everything is more spread out; hence, less density. So I feel like a lot of people disagree on which end of the chicken-and-egg explanation. America is big, and has areas that will never be covered by transit, but that’s not an explanation for why out-of-car transit is terrible in its urban centers. It’s generally caused by poor decisions in infrastructure investment.