Agreed, but in the US I think we simultaneously need to invest in public safety and mental health facilities or no one is going to use the new mass transit facilities.
The reason transit systems fail is because governments sabotage them by prioritizing free-at-point-of-use car infrastructure like freeways, unmetered parking, etc. My favorite example being the extension of BART into Antioch, where the project budget was divided into half for BART and half for a toll-free 8-lane superfreeway, resulting in a system where nobody takes BART.
My car is comically faster to get almost anywhere I have to go, unless I’m trying to get to the Dunkin’s or newsstand at a T station.
The random route ability of cars (and bikes) will dominate fixed route radial spokes from the city center as is overwhelmingly common from mass transit systems.
I almost never want to go to the city center (in part because it's still a pain in the ass and time-consuming to get there, due to needing to use a bus and a subway or possibly a bus and two subway lines). I can find ready substitutes for most things in the mid-density half-urban area near where I live or in one of the nearby suburbs which are terribly connected by public transit [buses only and mostly radial bus lines].
If there was excellent public transit, I agree there'd be more services highly coupled to the transit hubs. As it is, much of the shopping areas have vast parking lots/garages instead, because that's how the merchants can stay in business: by catering to people who can actually get there efficiently.
And if you ignore the time and monetary cost of finding parking.
And honestly, the big thing needed to make transit viable is denser city planning. You can't do decent transit in a sprawl suburb, it's just not logistically possible.
Density really is the key.