Many cities in Europe still have their Roman era street plans. The street layout of a city is incredible sticky. Once you have a city built around cars and all the private property and infrastructure that goes with it, you are basically stuck with it for 1000 years. And American city layouts are horrible for public transit and walking.
We can look at international cities with longing and jealousy, but LA, Houston, Miami, and so on will never have useable public transit. You’d have to bulldoze the whole city and start again. So great for Paris and London and yes I would rather live there, but we are stuck finding solutions that work inside the mess we made.
I agree with you in part - we do have 100 years of development patterns baked into concrete and steel, but they were not originally built just for cars.
LA was built around interurbans, the idea that I should drive my car all the way from San Bernardino (or frankly even from Pasadena) to Los Angeles would be foreign to the original planners and builders in Southern California. Consider that every major freeway in LA is basically in whole or in part paralleling a former PE line, and suddenly my assertion doesnt seem so odd.
LA is not the only place where the sprawled layout was created by interurbans, Arguably to a greater or lesser extent - Detroit, Dallas, Cleveland, Cincinatti, and there are others whose early development was deeply influenced by the interurban exist.
Wait, what? Paris streets are a mess, even after Haussmann. That does not prevent outstanding transit. Even before the latest obsessive aggressive agenda-driven nonsense. The two things that Paris has are (1) inhabitant and workplace density and (2) the will to pursue public transit decade after decade.
After that, there are lots of streets with a single lane of traffic - and buses go through them just fine. And there are lots of too narrow streets but they are isolated here and there - in between streets that are okay for buses. Equally there are lots of very wide avenues for several lanes of traffic and that's fine for pedestrians and transit even though it makes subway stations sometimes very wide. And there are lots of randomly angled streets. There are steep hills. There are rivers and canals and giant mining voids which make building subway tunnels interesting. There are lots of train track rights of way which sometimes block pedestrian traffic but are covered and crossed reasonably often (sometimes still not optimally so). There is snow, ice, floods, hot weather. You name it it's there.
Both of these are essential. "Decade after decade" is essential. Both density and building that infrastructure are impossible to build at the stroke of a pen. So an advantage of Paris compared to San Francisco is that it had decent inhabitant and workplace density from the infancy of public transit when it was private animal pulled carriages.
So what's missing in US cities: decade after decade of density followed by decade after decade of public intent. SF could do it - but for sure you wouldn't see the result tomorrow - but NIMBY so no, SF can't do it. Not before getting rid of NIMBY. LA is much more willing to build anything anywhere so it would have much more of a chance. But it's huge and people often live far from their place of work. Smaller areas with LA would have a better chance. Perhaps Glendale plus the entertainment industry north-south corridor? That might be manageable.
Yet still more "even then", ride Paris transit at rush hours in summer and you won't feel that it's all that good: it's sweaty, packed, and there are lots of timetable incidents. You will regret having chosen rush hour. You car would have been nicely air conditionned and comfortable (but depending on your trajectory would have been stuck in traffic for a while.)
We can look at international cities with longing and jealousy, but LA, Houston, Miami, and so on will never have useable public transit. You’d have to bulldoze the whole city and start again. So great for Paris and London and yes I would rather live there, but we are stuck finding solutions that work inside the mess we made.