If you look up historical photos and maps from a hundred years ago, one of the thing that you notice is that even pretty small towns in the US had local streetc

If you look up historical photos and maps from a hundred years ago, one of the thing that you notice is that even pretty small towns in the US had local streetcars. In modern days, these same towns would be equally well served with small bus routes (you don't need all the infrastructure costs of a streetcar system, after all). But also note that there's a strong directionality to trips--a lot of these are going to be "going from Podunk, Ohio to Chicago" not "Chicago to Podunk, Ohio", so the unsuitability of Podunk, Ohio to effective transit isn't that detrimental. There is a separate problem that bus transit in the US is almost invariably horribly laid out, but that has more to do with the US being culturally incapable of planning transit well, and especially the US being incurious about how transit works in places where it does work. Essentially, there's a blind spot (even among transit enthusiasts, annoyingly) that assumes that transit on anything less in scale than Manhattan is infeasible, so transit planning is equated with Manhattanization where it doesn't need to be.