[Doady]

I struggle to understand your idea, llamaorama. Bus does one trip toward the station has to return backward to continue doing further trips towards the station, right? The buses are returning no matter what.

I think the key to high transit ridership is a system that is connected, and that means redundancy. Not only reducing the gap between bus routes, and also reducing the gaps between buses on a route (e.g. higher frequencies, 24-hour service). A rail line or a bus route that is isolated is not going to be useful. More connections are needed.

More connections means that isolating urban routes and disconnecting from them suburban corridors is not the solution. The division of city and suburb is the root of the problem of transit in the US to begin. Why does ridership in US so much worse than Canada? It's because of the lack of suburban transit. Compare Toronto city to Chicago city, difference in transit ridership is two times. But compare Toronto suburb to Chicago suburb, difference in transit ridership is ten times. Ten times difference vs. two times difference. Division and isolation not the key, the key is connection, and that means connecting suburbs as well.

Hub-spoke is good for connecting nodes, but there are also corridors, best served by grid system. Suburban systems need hub-and-spoke routes, but they also need grid routes. Hub-and-spoke system and grid system together, overlapping. More buses means more ridership.

But Trinity Metro has 146 buses? Am I reading this right? 146 buses serving a city with a population of over 900,000? Come on. A typical 15km long route with buses averaging 15km/h per hour for all-stop service and 20km/h for limited stop service, that means 24 buses for 5 minute all-stop service and 9 buses for 10 minute express service. That's 33 buses just to serve one corridor. You cannot build a comprehensive system to serve a city of 900,000 effectively with just 146 buses. A city of that size probably has 5 major east-west corridors, 5 major north-south corridors, that's already around 200 buses needed right there. And then you have to consider all the minor corridors which will require hundreds more buses.

Here in Mississauga, suburb in Toronto area, the MiWay bus system has 504 buses (392 MiLocal buses and 116 MiExpress buses), and the per weekday ridership is over 200,000 boardings. If Fort Worth wants to get 200,000 boardings per weekday, it will need at least 504 buses as well. 3 times the buses seems a small price to pay for 10 times the bus ridership.

But of course Fort Worth and its transit system doesn't exist in isolation. It wants to connect people, build a more connected system with more connected routes, but the willingness of the rest of the region to be more connected is important too. Does Arlington still have no transit? City of 400,000 with no transit is just mind-boggling to me. Mississauga has Toronto and Brampton as neighbours, two cities with big transit systems of their own. But Fort Worth has Arlington as its neighbour? Such a massive gap in the region's transit network, directly adjacent to Fort Worth, in the path toward Dallas, that's always going to severely limit of transit in Fort Worth. Fort Worth needs lots of buses and riders not only between destinations within Fort Worth, but also to/from Arlington, and from there to/from Dallas, and it can't do it alone. Again, isolation and division is the root of the problems with transit in the USA.