Personally it’s not the cost of the bus that doesn’t appeal, but the frequency of the buses and how long the journey takes. This probably isn’t an issue in a big city where buses are very regular, but when they’re once an hour and they take at least twice as long as a car then it’s difficult to choose the bus when you can just hop in the car that’s on your drive or outside your house and go direct to where you want to go.

I don’t know what the realistic answer is. You could argue that we need more buses, but you’d have to flood the roads with buses to have a decent schedule for all possible routes, where they’re practically free at the point of use to entice people away from cars.