American here, Chicagoan specifically, and my city is one of maybe 3-4 in the US with a solid transit system. Often the excuse you hear here is that “the city wasn’t built with transit in mind, but with cars in mind.”
Many, many European cities have clean, accessible, easy transit systems – but they’ve been built in old, sometimes cramped cities that weren’t created with transit in mind. So how have you all been able to prioritize transit, culturally, and then find the space/resources/ability to build it, even in cities with aging infrastructure? Was there like a broad European agreement to emphasize mass transit sometime in the past 100 years?