The issue is that a lot of transit planning is politically motivated and done to maximize "coverage" rather than more meaningful metrics like ridership, usefulness, and profitability.
Planning for coverage allows you to tell individual taxpayers that they're "served" by the transit they help fund, but most will never use it because it's infrequent and the routes take forever to get anywhere. Optimizing for ridership means you focus on a smaller number of straight-line routes that are highly useful and run them at high frequency so that a smaller pool of people come to rely on them and use them regularly, instead of as a last resort.
> The issue is that a lot of transit planning is politically motivated and done to maximize "coverage" rather than more meaningful metrics like ridership, usefulness, and profitability.
That's definitely my experience in York Region (north of Toronto for those unfamiliar) and Ottawa. Far too many bus stops, but wait times > 15 minutes _per route_ outside all but the most peak parts of rush-hour. Including on their "bus rapid transit" trunk lines. You almost end up feeling like a patsy every time you decide to take public transit.
I enjoy taking LRT and buses in Waterloo Region, especially with my kids, but I think I go in expecting that there's a tradeoff— longer wait/travel time in exchange for being able to read on my kindle or play games on my phone on the way.
Busses are the thing that needs to be self-driving first (after trains, which can already be). Combined with automated passing spots.
The worst about busses is when they come every 30 min, but already arrive full. Or when they have more than one bus for a given timeslot and don't dock the less-full bus first.
In Seattle, a typical local bus trip costs the transit company around $10, while the ticket costs around $3. Running twice as many buses would result in cost of something like $18-20 per ride, which would make it require even more subsidies than it already receives.
That assumes the buses would be similarly packed. With a denser and reliable schedule you get more people using the bus and it can actually require fewer subsidies.
(In other words: instead of a half-empty bus every 20 minutes you end up with packed buses every 5 min)
The "farebox recovery ratio" for cars is also low: taxes and user fees only pay for only ~50% of the cost of roads, at most. The rest comes out the general fund.
I really think the answer to this is to run much smaller and cheaper buses instead of the extremely expensive big ones that only have a few occupants. Shuttle buses cost around $60-70k vs >$600k for a new full size bus. Of course, driver labor is also a significant cost, but I think it's easier to find shuttle bus drivers as it only requires a class B license.
