Reply #23: Mass transit works

[customerserviceguy]

for places where there are enough riders to keep enough buses running so that there is always one in another five or ten minutes if you just missed one, but that only applies to the largest cities in the country. There are plenty of suburban places, and small towns where individualized transportation solutions are needed.

People will not use mass transit unless they absolutely have to in places that can only run a bus line once an hour. I worked on a transit committee in a small Olympic Peninsula city of about 8,000 people that successfully passed a sales tax levy to provide free bus service within the town. The empty buses were an embarassment to us all, and the wingnuts loved to run ads in the local papers saying "Look at the empty buses, your tax dollars at work!"