Do a lot of people in America talk to random people and start a conversation on Public Transportation?

Yeah, I think this happens pretty often in America and personally it's one the things I like about Americans. The conversation rarely lasts more than a few seconds.

There are no trains here, but I've never had anyone attempt to talk to me on the bus, nor have I ever seen two people talk that didn't get on together. The only exception was people panhandling at the bus stops, and I wouldn't call those conversations.

was not uncommon in chicago pre 2k along with grocery store lines or whatnot. I feel like its less common now but I also don't ride public transit as much as decades ago.

Not so much anymore.

Cell phones have killed that kind of public interaction. I used to hear a lot of conversations going on when I traveled, now it's mostly silent.

Which to me is sad. You learn more by talking to others. Your view of the world expands. You see things in a different way. Random conversations give the opportunity to meet people and sometimes find people to date.
- I don't really want to meet a third of the Americans or have my world expanded with homophobes, transphobes, idiots, etc. People suck and if there's not some sort of filter, it's extremely draining and disheartening to deal with them.
- Between 9/11 and Covid, I was invited by a flight crew to ditch my Midwest destination and continue on to a party in Baltimore, guided by a stranger on a long bus trip and given his blanket so I could sleep leaning against him, shared food and gossip for hours with a large group of people I didn’t know, was offered a home-cooked meal and a night at a ranch in Texas with my family, exchanged numbers with new friends, etc.
  
  Now traveling isn’t a holiday - it’s more of a hostile endurance test. We all just want to be left alone.

I'll try exactly once to talk to a stranger in public and if they're receptive I keep going. If not I agonize about it for years afterwards

Depends heavily on the people I suppose. I think the pandemic might have changed things too? There's not like a huge barrier if there is some reason for it but it does seem to happen less often then the past.

What's weirdly more prevalent is people listening to music without earplugs. Seriously?!

I still talk to people at random in public. Really depends on where I am though

It's been my personal experience that those interactions usually happen at the bus stop or the train station prior to boarding. Then once on board, everybody just kind of fucks off and does their own thing.

Not in New England. That shit will get you an angry stare in New England.

I think it's a location based thing, combined with how individuals handle their presentation.

My town doesn't have much in the way of public transport. We're just too small. The one bus route with stops here is more of a county thing, and doesn't have any real rider volume. It just doesn't go enough places to do anything useful for most people, and the stops aren't realistically available to most of the town.

But, when you use it, people tend to be friendly and polite, so there's conversation going on. The folks that don't want to talk tend to signal it clearly and it's respected.

The city I lived in for a while had bus and now has light rail. People there tend to be less chatty, but you also run into more people that aren't good at reading when someone doesn't want to interact, so some of that ends up being very terse.

But I've visited other cities, and you really can't peg down a nation wide kind of transit culture. It is true that random conversations happen, though. It's not a myth, or some kind of trope, or something that used to be true but disappeared.