Yes, the infill has started here. A new condo project went in a few years back. I'm not sure when exactly, but its relatively new (<5 years) construction while everything else is 40 years old. Same thing with the malls.

With transit in the burbs, it's possible but you have to pick your battles. Just this evening I was out walking my dog by the park. Up comes a full sized fancy new diesel-electric hybrid bus. Not a single passenger on it. I've been on that bus line. That's one of the ways I get to know a place. Hop on the buses and just ride and see where I end up. It's a perfect example of "provide a minimum level of service". That bus runs through four neighborhoods and then finally to the mall/junior college. It doesn't hit a single useful thing on the way until it gets to the mall. The loop takes just under an hour and being near the beginning it takes only 40 minutes to take the circuitous tour of the housing to the mall that's less than three miles away. Meanwhile, a half a mile further from my house is another bus stop on the express route. That will take me to the mall in 6 minutes, downtown in under 20. It runs four times an hour from 5 am to 11 pm and is usually quite full.

One of those routes is useful. The other is paying someone 40k? a year to drive something around in circles that destroys roads and gets about 4-6 mpg for no reason. Pick your battles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_ef...ortation#Buses
At least in 2006, buses were LESS efficient than pickup trucks per passenger mile. The environmentally conscious thing to do would be go buy a pickup, unfortunately the bus would still keep running so that wouldn't work. This is why there is not broad support for public transit in the US. It's horribly mismanaged due to a philosophical notion that public transit is a service that must be provided even when there is not enough demand to justify it. Simply put, buses do not belong attempting to provide door to door service in sprawling suburbs in America. Along the suburban service corridors they often do make sense, such as the express bus that runs to downtown. It's useful precisely because it doesn't go meandering around the miles and miles of detached houses with large yards laid out in mazes so as to force through traffic onto arterial roads. If you don't live close to a corridor, too bad. I've never once picked a place in the city without consideration to public transit. It's incomprehensibly stupid to me that one would do so in the suburbs and then just expect that service to be provided to them when it isn't available everywhere in much denser urban environments where there is far more demand. If driving becomes more prohibitively expensive, then the suburbs will redevelop along a few productive corridors as is seen in most cities. It's not really density. Prague isn't any more dense than LA and has fabulous public transit. Partly thats because driving is more expensive, but it has much more to do with how Prague is laid out. Smaller neighborhoods, productive buildings are clustered together, no being forced to walk three quarters of a mile to get out of the neighborhood and onto arterial roads, etc.