Sorry if you're playing in to the joke, I can't tell. Streetcars / trams were widely deployed before they were ripped out for the car, driven by lobbyists interested in selling cars. Wondering why no one has bothered with that is starting from a false premise, because people have bothered with that.
I'm well aware that there are multiple options for public transport, but none of them are actually as flexible or as far reaching as cars/taxis. To me this 'but why not trains' on every article about self-driving cars is a tired meme that fails to address that these are not equivalent options. I might as well say "Well, why don't we get rid of these expensive rails and fixed timetables and just lay down some cheap concrete and let people navigate how they want" in just as condescending a tone and be equally as unconvincing.
There are car lobbyists of course but the streetcars in LA at least were put there by housing developments to sell suburban homes before most people owned cars. Once the homes were sold the corporation that built the rails had no incentive to maintain them, and eventually they were spun off and went bankrupt (of course competing with cars didn't help)
Nor did the fixed price controls they were often saddled with. It seems that politicians are congenitally completely incapable of considering inflation indexing as a concept when they are writing laws.
Street cars are a red herring anyway. Because street cars don't maintain anywhere near the same number of routes as free-form roads. It is a routing problem still, and railed vehicles perform much, much worse at it, which is why they need to be time multiplexed with rail schedules.