In the SF Bay area, it's almost the opposite: the suburbs actually have a pretty decent set of options for getting to the main transit hubs, and it's the cities that have trouble making transit "work" ... the "driving hell" you talk about is even worse when you're on a bus, where, in addition to the traffic, you have to stop every other block. There's a program started in the East Bay recently called "Fast Bus" that has things like signal overrides and skip-stop service but it's just gaining traction and is only on a single route for now. Efforts to expand (on notoriously congested streets such as Telegraph in Berkeley) are met with stiff resistence (and low funding priority).
> It is my experience that many US-ers are afraid of anything
> unfamiliar to them, especially people who look differently
> than themselves.
I think you're projecting here :-)
The real issue is that transit just isn't part of the culture the way it is in other parts of the world: I encounter people all the time who have lived in the Bay Area and who have NEVER gotten on BART. They aren't SCARED to do it, they just have never had occasion to for whatever reason.
I drove 100 miles r/t yesterday for a two hour meeting in the middle of one of the highest density worker zones in the Bay Area, down three of the most congested freeways we have to offer. I couldn't have done it using transit with under 4 connections and three hours each way (I've done it before!); in a car, it was just under an hour each way.
Blame the individuals in this system? Not me, pal.
/jordan