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America tolerates stuff that a lot of of countries would not . Threat of lawsuits for cracking down on people's civil liberties, or it going viral and people losing their jobs. People live in fear of being fired, assaulted, or sued for doing their jobs or enforcing some modicum of public decency.
but it's bad in the UK though, too https://metro.co.uk/2019/04/27/cleaners-reveal-most-soiled-london-underground-lines-9326006/
Regarding train quality, this new train though looks nice L.A. Metro celebrates Friday opening of new K Line with free rides, festival in Leimert Park
I think a lot of this depends where you look, such as this , which does not agree with the HBD angle of Asian superior IQ or impulse control. https://www.barstoolsports.com/blog/347906/chinese-kid-takes-a-dump-in-the-middle-of-airplane-aisle-because-the-bathroom-was-too-small
I think Germany has among the cleanest transportation and cities.
You'd have to compare many countries to see their laws and infrastructure.
The pictures in that article were cherrypicked from a group of trains at a depot which had been taken out of service for cleaning. I use the tube 2-3 times a week and I have never been on a train that bad - unsurprisingly, because a train that did get that bad would be taken out of service for cleaning.
Reading the article text, the vast majority of the trains that get that dirty are on the lines which run 24 hours on Friday/Saturday nights - in other words the mess is being made by drunks coming home from nightclubs. On the small number of times I have used the night tube, the trains were clean.
By Continental European or 1st-world Asian standards, the London Underground is a bit on the grubby side - comparable to Naples (although part of that is that a lot of European systems ban eating and drinking on the train - I hated this when I was in Berlin). The NYC subway is filthy. OP's link is suggesting that the LA subway is even worse than NYC.
This is another part of the general social relaxation around rules of how to behave in public, which I think has contributed to the whole problem. When I was a kid (and I'm working-class/lower middle-class in origin) my mother would not let us eat or drink in the street. That was bad manners. It was low class behaviour. And I'm talking about "we passed by men pissing on walls in the daytime" so while I'm not saying "drinking a soda on a hot day because you're thirsty while walking down the street is one step away from public indecency", it was treated as all part of the same set of behaviours: there was low class carry-on like all that, and there were good manners, where you knew how to behave in a public space. We all had to share it and get along, we couldn't treat it as our own private bubble.
So I do think that relaxation of mores over time does lead to tolerance of lax behaviour, and then the people at the very bottom just behave worse and worse because why not? We all have had experiences of people playing music in public where the earphones don't block it out, or people who have entire conversations on their phones and you learn intimate details of a stranger's life. If you're at home, you can take off your shoes, sprawl over the seats, eat and drink while on your phone and not sitting at the kitchen table, all the rest of it - because you're at home, it's your private space.
Treating public spaces as private spaces blurs the distinction, and eating on public transport is just one step up from talking on your phone to sprawling over the seats to... so on and so forth. And then, as I said, the worst inclined because they're violent or just crazy take it all the way: assault others, shit on the floor, do what they like. Because hey, you are not the boss of them, and they don't owe anything to anyone, we're all individuals with our rights!
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I ride the NYC subway every day, and this simply isn't true. The trains are clean, and the stations are clean, though some are a bit old and dingy. There are of course exceptions -- late night revelers are wont to litter, as are kids coming home from school -- but that is what they are: exceptions.
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