Or maybe, in at least some cases, just people too unimaginative or dimwitted to consider other options. It's a huge country, after all - Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn are only a very, very tiny part of it despite the image in the cartoon. But then again: "No one in this world so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." (—H.L. Mencken, Chicago Daily Tribune, September 19, 1926)

As to the occupants of the trains, it's not just an American thing. One of my 'favorite' occurrences was the time when a couple of us got to the platform on the Paris Metro (RATP), and nothing was moving. Soon they announced (in French only, naturally, and well-garbled by the typical cheapskate PA system found on subways the world over) that service was discontinued (with no estimated time for restarting, and most likely due to a routine bomb threat but who knows.) So almost everyone just stood there obliviously as though their train was still about to arrive. Nobody there to speak of but tourists and immigrants from the Maghreb, none of them giving any sign of understanding any French. After all, the long-time natives were busy burning expensive fuel by clogging up the surface streets to near gridlock, as always. So we just left along with a few others, and took an RER train to the general area where we were going.