Yes, I ignored that on purpose because it doesn't make sense.

I'm reminded of Abraham Lincoln's joke: "How many legs does a dog have, if you count the tail as a leg?"

The money counts as spending, even if you say it doesn't.

It is not spent on transportation, it is spent on something else, and deducted from the transportation budget. If somebody steals your wallet and uses your card to buy an NFT, did you spend that? It came from your account.

Governments spent huge amounts of money on what they at least thought were public transportation projects. In California, the public voted for propositions approving this spending. This shows that spending on public transit is popular. The will is there. It's fairly conventional wisdom that improving public transit is important.

The execution of these plans is often pretty bad. This shows that something is going wrong other than having public support.