More or less everyone agrees that public transport can be better, should be better and we would all be better off with more of it. They might disagree on how to get it — whether by investing in privately run fleets of driverless cars, say, or state-backed trams — but there is general consensus on the benefits.
These are many and varied. You might use public transport, for example, to alleviate poverty through subsidised or free fares. Or you might use it to expand the effective economic area of a city by growing its labour market, or to boost tourism, or the night-time economy. You might want to improve commuter links between a population centre and a place of work. Or your priority might be tackling climate change.
Yet in many places, public transport does not achieve any of these aims very well or even as well as it could. Part of the problem is that public transport is one of the things that a country does that everyone can see and touch — it is a “final mile” service. It is therefore attractive both to politicians who want to be seen to be doing something and to campaigners who want to call on politicians or companies to do something.