If your city has crappy mass transit, and is designed for car driving with office areas and places of interest being several miles apart each, it's no wonder people don't ride mass transit.
Another often overlooked fact is that the US rail network is designed for cargo/freight not passengers and is outstanding in that regard.
That's of course a design decision (urban planning). The average US city prioritized cars over efficiency, the environment and people actually having a chance to connect and build an urban culture (like NY or Chicago or SF has -- or had) outside of strip malls.
It's a godsend compared to being stuck in the traffic (can work/play on laptop/tablet), sleep or talk to someone if I'm bored (usually same people travel regularly on the same line during the same time and in the same carriage). All in all I can have a good 1.5 hours of semi-productive time when using PT. The opposite is true if I were to use a car. Utter waste of time/money.
PT is the only way to go but this heavily relies on the infrastructure in place and how reliable the system can be. I used PT in Chicago and Boston for 3 years and hated it. By the same token living in Asia (Singapore for example) where timetables don't even exist on some lines because the trains run so often and regularly was fantastic. Melbourne falls somewhere in the middle, good services hampered by old infrastructure (some signal stations have been operational without an upgrade for the last 100 years!!!) and frequent air-conditioning breakdowns in hot weather.
The problem with PT is that most of us associate it with smelly, crowded, unreliable and expensive alternative to car ownership. But it does not have to be that way. Once you try a well designed and reliable PT solution there is no going back, trust me!
Also, IMHO buses are way worst then trains as a mean of transportation (may be why some many people hate PT). Every time there is maintenance work on my line and buses replace trains temporarily I prefer to work from home. Can't imaging a two hours bus commute (which heavily depends on the traffic conditions) with a shaky laptop on my lap.