It's not really "crazy" from an economic perspective.

In order to convert our past 60 to 100 years of suburban sprawl everywhere as a country into public transport you'd have to invest hundreds of billions of not trillions nationally into light rail and bus systems. It's also not clear where the land to run those lines would come from either because it's all privately owned and would have to be seized by eminent domain, if for example you wanted to build light rail through the Richmond metro area.

Stakeholders don't want to change anything. People driving mostly want to keep driving themselves, and business owners don't want to risk losing any volume because the parking or road outside their business has been taken away. We couldn't even convince a handful of places on Broad St to give up a small amount of 2 hour parking spots to have the Pulse run along the curb instead of in the middle of Broad.

It's also simply cheaper to maintain existing highway and road networks than it is to try to end those things or replace some of them. And COVID just fucked budgets everywhere, too, so it's not like there is a surplus of hundreds of billions of dollars sitting around.

So you'd have to essentially convince people to be taxed more to pay for this massive renovation, convince all the people who prefer driving to stop, convince business owners to go along with it, and convince politicians to risk being the ones advocating for this mostly unpopular stuff.

It's never happening. No one wants to hear this, but there is about zero chance cars are replaced to any degree in Richmond in the next 50 years let alone most of the country. This isn't to say we shouldn't try to get some of them off the road, but rather being realistic - the political will, voter will, and money isn't there for a magical massive public transportation conversion. We're mostly stuck with this.