Lots of people in fuck cars communities are black and white about it. They're very unwilling to even discuss compromise. They'll say the city needs to build a subway system under all the farmland.

You tell me; your community was likely first built by having a train line drawn out to it in the frontier era, and later had the tracks scuttled due to obsolescence and overt state support for the motor vehicle alternative.

Rural rail has been done and is still done in pretty much every country that's not the USA. If you're a farmer, there's a lot of rationale to having rail built out to whatever market terminal you sell your product at. It's not unheard of for farmers to build out small private rail lines across the farm to transport goods, equipment, themselves, etc.

I think it's fair to say absolutely 0 cars is also a problem. But we could use a bit more public transport, and less cars than what we currently have. Especially where we know many people move "in mass", like cities in rush hour.

Public transport only really works in crowded areas

You have this backwards. Areas become dense due to the presence of public transport, not the other way around. Infrastructure comes before population, not afterwards. This remains true even in car-world, because even drivers won't really travel where there's no meaningful roads to do so.

Bumfuck, North Dakota is Bumfuck, North Dakota specifically because of the lack of investment in transport, not because it "doesn't work". If Bumfuck convinced someone to pull a spur off of the old Great Northern Line that runs through northern ND, it might grow into something much larger.

People who make this argument never seem concerned about how their local government can afford to maintain its suburban stroads and all the supporting infrastructure they require, which is all ludicrously more expensive per person than the same infrastructure in walkable/transit-oriented development. Not to mention the cost imposed on people living there who would not have to own a car, even in small rural towns and villages, if the development patterns were different.

Said development also can be, was always historically, and in many places still is, compact and transit-connected. Switzerland has an incredible train system connecting all of its tiny mountain villages with its cities, but even America used to have the same thing before the auto and oil industries hijacked the government. There's even a rail museum in Sacramento where you can learn about that history, and there's documentation of the compact, walkable downtowns we used to have before we bulldozed them to build parking lots.

You're probably right about the state of things in your hometown, as that is how things currently are in most of America, but your assumption that it has to be that way and would be more expensive if it was otherwise is ahistorical, contrary to economics, and defeatist.