Yes, wilderness areas, and largely undeveloped and unpopulated farmland are not places anyone is suggesting public transit for.

The majority of the US lives clustered together, with big gaps between the clusters that are sparsely populated. What EVERYONE means by public transit, is publicly funded buses and trains which come regularly for local areas, occasionally run daily or a few times a day from smaller local hubs to bigger cities, and trains, plans, and buses that run maybe daily or weekly from big cities to other big cities.

So someone living in a suburban town of a few thousand people could take a bus which leaves every 3 hours to a train station on the outskirts of a 500k person city 45 minutes away, and could the next day catch the train to a city a few hours away, and then at the train station within an hour take a local subway to a suburban neighborhood of that city and and 20 minutes later catch a bus and get off three blocks away from family. And that this travel would cost maybe a day’s wages at minimum wage.

No one wants hourly bus routes in the scrubland and cow farms and desert that the train crosses going between the cities. If you live in a village that’s a highway stop, has two bars and 3 churches and 470 people live there, you are SOL. But that’s not most people. Most people should get public transit unless they want to live in the wilderness.

Like… let’s put it this way. Anywhere you have a public utility company instead of wells and septic tanks, you should have accessible public transit.