This is always so weird to me. These problems have already been pretty much solved in other countries, but the US always thinks it's a special snowflake. Public transport works pretty well for non-young healthy people in other countries.
However if you can easily find pictures of Amsterdam in the 1970s where the streets look just as crammed with cars as any other city of that time. What happened is that people decided this wasn't working at all and they simply made a choice and they made a change to their spending priorities. Anyone can do this. All that is needed is the political will to make it a priority.
Amsterdam has average temps (in F) from the mid 30's to the mid 60's[0]. That's prime bike weather. That's pretty much in line with San Francisco, which is a good city for biking. Even Manhattan and Brooklyn have reasonably overall pleasant weather for biking.
But compare SF to somewhere like Washington, DC, or Austin, TX. For 3-4 months of the year, DC feels like a swamp. Same with Austin. It's much more preferable to use public transit or drive than bike in that weather.
Credit where credit is due, I stole most of my ideas about this from [0]. It's a non-prestigious contrarian blog that's easy to mock, but he seems to be correct on the merits about cities.
[0] http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2008/072008.html
Public transit is not resilient to these things. Our streetcars shut down in Toronto during heavy snowfall because they'll derail if the tracks aren't clear. Ice gets into the concrete supporting the tracks and they need to constantly be repaired because of that.
Asphalt roads are cheap and easy to maintain. Hell, you don't even need asphalt, cars are perfectly capable of driving on dirt or gravel. You can drive a car on shitty, broken asphalt, but you can't drive a train on broken tracks. There is a resiliency to road and cars that public transit just doesn't have.
They also have weather patterns that generally match ours. Sure, not tornadoes afaik, but that's not a huge chunk of damage to the US either. Public transit is resistant to those things. They have snow, ice, and other cold-weather issues over there as well and somehow seem to get along just fine.
And car's resiliency comes at an unsustainable cost. Not only is it environmentally unsustainable, it's not even population-density sustainable. Sure, there are big empty areas of land where it wouldn't make sense to put public transportation, just like in Europe. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the areas where it does make sense to implement it, just like in Europe.
None of these problems are really unique to the US.
Seriously, Most of Europe is further north than Maine.
Copenhagen and Amsterdam - 2 big cycling/transit cities get plenty of snow and rain.
U.S. wrt transit is "special" because we don't spend money to get a functioning system.
Most journeys are short distance, however. The article describes commuting, where the distances should be comparable between North America and Europe.
When's the last time you took the car to work rather than the bus because a hurricane hit your area? Last time you looked out the window, saw a tornado and said, "Looks like I'm driving to work today, honey, and not taking the bus."?
Ice storm? You better be a cardiologist needing to get to the hospital to do life-saving surgery if you're driving in that. Because the world doesn't need you in the office writing yet-another-javascript-framework that badly.
Heat wave? Okay, ya got me there. Take the air-conditioned car instead of the bicycle.
Even in an urban area with transit, most US cities have forced desegregation which means kids are scattered all over and economies built around cars. I could take public transit to work (30-40 minutes vs 10 in a car), but have to travel to the other side of the city to get to my kids school (15m by car, 60 by transit). Oh and even in an urban area, the nearest supermarket is a 20 minute walk.
My relatives in Europe walk 5 blocks to school, have decent local shopping options, etc.
Using a car in the US isn't that expensive, but offers a dramatic level of flexibility and freedom. I'm not limited to working in my city's central business district or forced to miss most of my kids school events.