Public transit in the U.S. is a classic chicken and egg situation: outside of a few metropolitan areas, transit networks are not dense enough to be useful so few people take public transit. If few people take public transit, there is not enough demand or political will to expand transit networks, leading to low ridership, and so on. With this cycle, it becomes easy for politicians to forgo investing the capital and political will necessary to build out transit networks because they can point to low ridership and say there is no public appetite for it.