[kalleboo]

> Le sigh. If you want more bus passengers in each bus, you either need to run buses with longer intervals (making them completely useless) or you need to pack people together. Packing people together densely enough to make buses work inevitably requires living in small apartments

This is not my experience. Living in a village of around 2000 pop in Sweden with pretty much only single-family houses with gardens. The whole village was within 15 minutes walk or bike within one of 3 bus stops to a bus service that went into the city every 20 minutes during the day, with double-length buses during peak hours. The buses had a very healthy occupancy rate.

You just have to make sure to design towns around the transit instead of around cars. US suburbs are really hard to retrofit transit into, with designs that actively subvert it