I think those systems are undergoing continuous change, so change is always possible. I also don't think that the area I lived in grew up in fact designed before the ubiquity of cars (I grew up suburban but not rural), although I currently live in the old-city of a small student town, since I want to live more urban. But yeah, it's easier if there's a structure suited to public transit (if the suburban towns have a "core" that's connected by rail to the city and nut just evenly spread out, or enough density anyway etc.).
But I originally just wanted to get at that public transportation not a myth, not forced on people, but preferred by many all over the world.
They’re under continuous incremental change. The problem is that infrastructure has momentum that lasts centuries. The infrastructure that works well is the infrastructure that people want to use and it’s the infrastructure that people want to invest in, and people make their living decisions around the current state.
US suburbs are often sprawled out enough that they aren’t really walkable. There’s a millennia of incremental changes that you’d have to make to an area like Phoenix to make it look anything like a walkable dense city.
But I originally just wanted to get at that public transportation not a myth, not forced on people, but preferred by many all over the world.