Part of why I think cities around the world went all in on highways is that its so much simpler and therefore cheaper to serve people with highways than to plan

Part of why I think cities around the world went all in on highways is that its so much simpler and therefore cheaper to serve people with highways than to plan effective transit routes and schedules. With a transit route you have to consider that people will be walking to the station so its fundamentally a compromise: where one person has a 5 minute walk to the platform on the subway line inevitably means there are people not even very far away who now have a 15 minutes walk, and people farther out who might not even use the local subway because that means they add an hours walk to their day. To serve those people you now need to start planning bus or bike networks on top of the subway. All of these vehicles need operators who need benefits. You also need maintenance yards for rail and bus. Electrical substations. The actual subway line is just a part of it all. With a highway on the other hand, it seems a lot easier to serve more people with less complicated infrastructure. When you run a highway to a town instead of the subway line example above, pretty much everyone in town is close enough to the local highway ramp with a car on the existing road network. You don't have to consider schedules or hire train operators, people drive themselves when it works for their commute. This highway also serves freight, so now you don't need to sell right of way to a freight rail company with the expectation they maintain the line to your town forever (they probably wont). A truck bay is cheaper to build for a business than a freight rail loading dock and maintenance of a rail spur. A lot of cities in the US that are I'd say less than 1 million people without any geographic bottlenecks are a dream to get around with a car. You pretty much never hit traffic on the highway, so 20 miles is 20 mins away always. The highway network serves the entire region, so you can go just about everywhere in the area in 20 miles in those 20 minutes, not just a handful of places. To offer that sort of convenience, turnkey scheduling with basically 25 minute door to door commutes, in transit form across lets say a 20x20 mile area would be enormously expensive, in the low trillions I'd guess given current american prices on subway tunnels per mile. Whatever we can afford to build won't nearly be so useful, and people are already so addicted to this sort of high speed car based transit that the cat is entirely out of the bag and now this is the expectation, this simply unachievable level of personal convenience using transit.