Bikes only work for short distances and then only in reasonably good weather AND when you don't need to carry much. Buses and trains are only efficient than ca

Bikes only work for short distances and then only in reasonably good weather AND when you don't need to carry much. Buses and trains are only efficient than cars if they have a reasonable number of riders who want to go between roughly the same two places at roughly the same time. (Note that the number of people passing by two points is NOT a good proxy for going to the same places.) That's easy with a lot of population density, especially in a small area. But, without those conditions, cars are more efficient. The Netherlands is a great case for buses, trains, and bikes. The US is different. (As the saying goes, Europeans think that 100km is a long way while Americans think that 100 years is a long time. The typical US car travels 20-25km per year and 50km/year is not rare.) The Netherlands has less than 18 million people in roughly the area of New Jersey, which the fourth smallest US state. (New Jersey plus New York City have roughly 17M people.) The US is 240-270x as large, depending on whether you count water. (To put that in context, the land part of the Netherlands is less than 280x larger than Disneyworld.) As to "spending time around other people", the "fraction of population in urban regions" numbers look similar, 90% for the Netherlands and 80% for the US, but half of the US "urban population" lives in small towns that are dozens of kilometers from the next town. That's simply not possible in the Netherlands. The Netherlands has roughly 15x the population density of the US and even the "rural" regions are close to the cities because they can't be far away. The longest distance across the Netherlands is roughly 300km. The short way across the US (Mexico to Canada) is over 2,500km and the long way (Atlantic to Pacific) is around 4,500km. I work from home, so my "to work" is down the hall. That said, when I did work on site, I never worked where mass-transit between near to my house and near to my work made sense and I never worked close enough to bike. (Note that I live in Silicon Valley, which is pretty high density for the US.) But, there's more than work. Most weekends, I travel over 250km. About once a month, I travel about 630km. None of those trips have enough people going the same places at the same time to justify small vans, let alone buses, and trains are completely out of the question.