It's good to see a collection of the usual suspects like Bob Cervero. And, Tokyo completed its first line in the 1920's, so some of this thesis contains a fair amount of "generalization" and other editorial flummery...

I go back to what the US spends as a percentage of the GDP we spend on ground transportation, at the last time I did it back in the late 2000's, the US spent somewhere around $800 billion on all forms of surface ground transportation, of which $26 billion was spent on all bus, rail, commute, and Amtrak. We spent about 3% of the total budget (this is both the public and private costs combined, since many transit items are "public" goods, transit has a higher public expenditure, as opposed to say parking which is usually private, or roads which are usually public for auto travel) that we spend on all forms of public transit, and generated about 3% of all trips.

So we get about the level and quality of transit service that we are willing to pay for... Other places spend more of a share of that budget on transit, and less for things like our huge investment in "free" parking, or in the care and feeding of our cars, that's all.