They say, as I know people in the midwest who commute 1.5 hours each way to the city for their job and then turn around and drive home. I have a friend who lives in a town of no shit, 400 people.

There's no bus that goes there. It's 30 miles from the nearest "city" of 15,000, and he works another 20 miles past that.

You can survive without cars

Sure, they'll just not eat, not work, and not do anything. Dude I'm all for urbanization and adding mass transit, but you're going to be hard pressed to add rail routes or even bus routes to not just that one town of 400, but all the other thousands of tiny towns. I'm not saying America is an exception, I'm saying you're naive for thinking your one opinion will work for everyone, and that the problem is more nuanced then you understand.

That's why I brought up Cali HSR. It's been over a decade of planning and building that, and that's connecting two of the largest cities in the country, and you're just casually saying "Just build it everywhere". Like yes we want that too, but the realities of building that would be centuries of work.