And you are here why?

Jarrett Walker makes the point that public-transit decisions are not made in a vacuum, that there are actual tradeoffs that need to be made between Ridership  and Coverage. If public transit agencies were charged  exclusively  with maximizing their ridership, and all the green benefits that follow from that, they could move their empty buses to run in places where they’d be full.  Every competent transit planner knows how to do this.  Just abandon all service in low-density areas, typically outer suburbs, and shift all these resources to run even more frequent and attractive service where densities are high, such as inner cities.  In lower-density areas, you’d run only narrowly tailored services for brief surges of demand, such as trips to schools at bell-times and commuter express runs from suburban Park-and-Rides to downtown Mind you, this goes dead against the idea of Coverage  - if you told the people who were squawking about "empty trains...