[addicted44]

This is pretty much completely anecdotal, and not very useful, to be honest.

The informal stuff doesn't work well. I'm guessing they went to buy their furniture off the informal buses during off peak hours. So they didn't have to deal with the crowds the majority of people have to deal with during regular rush hours, where you will find people hanging off the buses, and others struggling to get in. Sure, the bus may come every 5 minutes, but you may have to wait a few buses to get in.

Further, these are private buses. In the US you can get a cab exactly where you want that takes you exactly where you want. You could also "rideshare". The reason you dont have buses to do that in the US is because people can afford single occupancy cabs. What the person is really complaining about is the fact that the US is richer and things are more expensive.

A cab is a proper analogy to the private transport that is being compared to. And the real complaint is that earning dollars and then paying in dollars in the US is more expensive than earning dollars and then paying in local currency in the 3rd world.

[danaris]

> The reason you dont have buses to do that in the US is because people can afford single occupancy cabs.

It's much more complicated than that, though.

Public transport is looked down upon in the US—not just in the same classist way it is looked down upon in many places, "that's for the plebes", but like many public institutions, it is viewed by many to be inherently worse than private solutions, both ideologically and practically.

To a large extent, it is a victim of the deliberate practice of the American right wing, over the course of at least the last several decades, of reducing funding for public services (because Big Government Bad), then decrying their ineffectiveness (well, duh, they're not doing great because you took away half their budget), and pushing for them to be privatized.

[zip1234]

NIMBYism is about the only thing that unites political parties in the US these days.

[oftenwrong]

Most roads in the US are public, and funded with taxation. Granted, it requires a private car to benefit from them. Still, this suggests that anti-government sentiments can only partially explain this aspect of US transportation.