If you didn't pay for roads, but you wanted public transit, I don't see how that works.

There's plenty of room to improve cities without having to bemoan that rural people are living wrong. About the only place I could see is making rural people switch over to intra-city transit instead of trying to have the cars wiork to get within a block of any given destination. That's probably about as far I think to inconvenience rural people to meaningfully improve things.

Mass transit is only efficient if you have a density of people going the same way at the same time. A bus is only better when you have significant occupancy, and that's not going to happen in very low density living.