Even if you could sell the car and get a bus pass, the buses in my area are going to take 2+ hours to get you someplace that it takes 20-30 minutes to drive. So tack on that time, and factor in the cost of a person's time - or, you know, just subtract the sleep that could have occurred in that time (cuz usually yeah, it's "i gotta wake up at 6 to take the bus to be on time for my shitty retail mall job where my shift start is 9:30) and think about that. Taking the bus means you have to get up at 6 AM to get to your shit shift at 9:30 AM and then, when your shit shift is over at 5, waiting til 6 to catch the bus and getting home at 8. Or so on. The buses don't run 24/7, so if you get off at 10, good luck finding a way home. And yeah, shit mall jobs, you will be getting off at 10 some nights. This is out in a fake city in the basic burbs, so I'm not talking NYC or LA or some shit. I don't know what their busing is like. But public transpo in the hubs like NYC, Atlanta, LA, Seattle, etc, is going to be very different even from the average American's shitty experience. Hell, it's my understanding that Atlanta is simply not made for public transport - the city's extremely spread out and it's hard to get from most places to most other places unless you have a car.
The one thing that doesn't get enough mention is bicycles and scooters. I think most people dismiss them as non viable in the US because they are dangerous but they are often significantly cheaper to own and use per mile than cars. In other countries they are much more common as a mode of transportation than in the US for that reason.
My dad bikes to work everyday, I don't even know how long it takes but it has to be over an hour each way, he's insane. Also very healthy for his age which is the up side of course. I'm going to just go ahead and assume though that we have more bike lanes where I'm from too.
I actually saw a statistic yesterday about how 7 of the top 10 cities for amount of people taking public transit to work in North America are Canadian cities. The reason the stat was that way too was because of the burbs. So apparently this is something we are good at and also investing even more money in. I mean my last job involved an hour and a half sometimes longer bus ride to go what would have been a 10 minute drive (I knit so it's never wasted time). For someone like me though that's awesome because my earlier option was carpooling in at 7 am, waiting around for one 4pm class then going back a few hours later because I lived way out in the middle of nowhere ( I very rarely attended this class). So when I moved and I had buses at my disposal it was amazing. But a big component of that is apparently Canadian cities are really good at public transit.