Exactly, and it's good old fashioned racism that they use to get away with it, too.

Public transit still has a stigma in many parts of the US as being for poor people who can't afford cars. And as it happens, nonwhite Americans are a lot more likely to be economically disadvantaged due to institutionalized racism. On top of that, they are also a lot more likely to live in urban environments where there is some semblance of public transit due to the phenomena of white flight, where white people by-and-large started moving out of cities to get away from the coloreds, and so riding the train or taking the bus has become "out of style".

Basically, a white middle class American is likelier to reject the option of public transit because they don't want to share space with poor minorities, and so public transit is limited to urban pockets surrounded by an impenetrable wall of NIMBYism. Plus no one with the resources to afford a car wants to support measures to create more environments where cars are not needed, so attempts to improve existing public transit often fail.