Originally Posted By plpeters70 ^^ All of Florida is like that. The whole state seems to have been built around the idea that everyone has a car. Try to go anywhere without a car and you're only option in most of the state is a crappy bus system, that will probably take you hours more than if you could just drive. It's really a shame to no one planned for mass transit - and the way the "cities" are all designed, it would now be a major, expensive effort to connect everyone to a transit system. And you would probably still be left with something very inefficient.
Originally Posted By gurgitoy2 Also, many suburbs don't even have sidewalks! Talk about mass transit problems, there are even pedestrian problems. America is such a "car culture" that's it's an extremely hard sell outside of urban centers to get anybody to entertain riding a bus or light rail. However, as Alexbook pointed out, there are still many people who rely on public transportation as their only option. That would be me...I can't drive, so I must rely on the bus/train to get anywhere. I grew up in Southern California too, and once I moved out of my parent's house, I had to find urban places to live. Many employers also won't hire you if you tell them the bus is your only option. I had a few interviews that went south when I told them I could only get to work by bus. They told me that it was not a reliable means of getting to work, so they chose not to hire me. I had a job once that flew me out to Utah for 6 weeks for a project, and that was pretty difficult. That was a place I noticed no sidewalks for pedestrians, and no buses...at least going to where I needed to go. I had to be picked up every morning, and dropped off at my hotel every night. I tried walking places, but it was totally unfriendly for that. Now I live in the NYC metro area and I love it. I can go anywhere at any time of day or night with no problem. There are schedules, but things run pretty frequently, you don't have to wait too much. The most I've ever had to wait for a late-night train was 30 minutes. Compare that to living in SoCal and having to wait an hour between connections, and then realizing that the last bus runs at 8PM... We have a lot of work to do as a country if we want any kind of viable public transportation system in non-urban areas. It will take massive rethinking, and money...which nobody is willing to spend.
