[vel0city]

> It’s one tool for providing lifeline access to hard-to-serve areas, where availability, not ridership, is the point.

From your own article. Flexible/microtransit/whatever you want to call it can be a good idea, and it can be done right. Its not a replacement for a bus route with any level of decent ridership, its for the areas where there literally aren't enough people interested in riding a bus to make the bus practical. Once ridership numbers get high enough, the transit groups should absolutely upgrade those areas to actual bus lines, but until then it is an option to serve places that otherwise wouldn't be able to be effectively served by decent bus service economically.

[jimkleiber]

It makes me think of how I've heard some universities will pave the paths that students had walked, vs creating the paved paths and hoping students walk on them [0]:

> The team at UNC went back into the archive for us and found some plans from the 60s and 70s, when they were really expanding the campus. An archivist discovered one of the written goals for planners was to "build paths where students were going rather than building some sort of grid system."

I believe micro-transit could play a similar role, basically helping the planners even figure out which routes people want to take before they turn them into fully funded routes.

[0]: https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/next/desired-paths-...