I live near Atlanta, in a spot where taking a train anywhere means I have to drive at least 80% of the way to my destination, then park and buy a train ticket to ride the last 20%.

The nearest bus route to me also requires that I drive 15 minutes away, and it runs infrequently and only directly to midtown, with few if any stops along the way (and it lacks a dedicated bus lane, so it doesn’t buy me any escape from the same traffic I’d hit while driving, except that I could read on the bus or something). When I still commuted for work, I didn’t need to go to midtown. I needed to go to Buckhead, which would’ve required that I walk a considerable ways from the bus terminal (if I’m remembering right), then get on a train that would take another 30 minutes. Total one-way trip time would’ve been over 2 hours. Driving early in the morning got me there in 45 minutes.

Most of that is due to hardcore NIMBYism around me, with just a touch of racism tossed in (of the sort where majority-white suburbs that have Confederate memorabilia shops always shoot down any transit expansion or funding by saying “we don’t want urban crime, that’ll make us just like Atlanta”…which just so happens to be one of the more majority-black major cities in the US).

Still, what it means for me is that public transit is totally unfeasible for getting around the Atlanta area.

It also doesn’t exist at all between metro areas. There’s only Amtrak, a private company, which has routes so limited that to get from Atlanta to Savannah (both in the same state) by train I’d first have to route up through North Carolina and Virginia and then catch a different train back around. Atlanta and Savannah are 3ish hours away from each other by car. They’re around 30hours apart by train. (This is not an exaggeration; you can plug this all into Amtrak’s “Plan Your Trip” tool yourself).

I went to Boston recently for a work trip. Their public transit actually goes places, and Boston’s particular form of sprawl seems to be the sort where there are smallish neighborhoods a few train stops away from their midtown. In that sort.of environment, I think I’d be riding the train more often for work commuting or “I don’t need to carry anything around” purposes, but use-cases like grocery store trips still seem like something where the car as a “stuff transporter” still retains a lot of value.