Investing is public transport can be as hard or as easy as you want it to be. Sure building a full on subterranean high density metro system might be the utopia, but actually developing a high frequency, high quality bus route with dedicated bus lanes can be low cost and hugely increase the volume of people carried Vs the lane you took from cars.
Compliment this with docking cycle rental schemes, and some dedicated cycle infrastructure and you can transform how a big chunk of people get to work ...you start to win back the city from one which is built around cars and instead making it a city for people.