Oddly enough School Busses do cover almost every address in the US, which demonstrates such a network isn’t inherently difficult to build. Rather automobiles are just really convenient in low density areas.
For two trips a day; they're effectively charter buses. And a lot of them take very long, circuitous journeys; my kid's bus comes at 6:45 AM, long before school starts!
Now make them run every 10-15 minutes so anyone can get anywhere any time, also add a bunch of transfer points and intermodal nodes...
It’s normally 4 cycles a day. 2 for high school kids and 2 for elementary school kids. That’s why some of the circuits are so long they don’t pick up kids at a large fraction of houses they pass buy. Busses close to the school then do multiple routes because they can fill up so quickly.
It should be obvious how that same basic model could get someone from any location to any location in a county twice a day. It would just be really inconvenient compared to cars.
My high-school only had 2000 students, and elementary/middle school had only a fraction of that.
Surely a lot of us work on campuses / office complexes that have more than 2000 office workers?
If we have bus systems that can effectively serve ~500 person elementary schools or ~300 person elementary schools, surely we can serve a 5000-person office complex with some kind of mass-transit option?
This creates an interesting work model: drive to work via company bus in the morning, drive home via company bus in the evening, just leave your laptop on the bus. Travel time counts as work time. Same route twice a day, so everybody works the same length.
