Nintendo has been continuously iterating the Pokemon franchise based around the situation on the ground in Japan, not North America, and as a result there's probably a lot of room for folks to create a Pokemonlike that is more designed for the North American play style. For example, Pokemon Black/White, the most recent version, has a huge amount of innovative local play features, but in NA, commuting to work, you're very unlikely to randomly happen across any folks that will have the game and so these features are for many quite useless.
The primary market for Pokemon remains children. Children tend to congregate in large numbers at schools and playgrounds. Nintendo's lack of focus on the "commuting to work" crowd is not particularly surprising.
