Where I live the major employer is Cornell University and almost all of the buses stop there. A Cornell id will get you on any bus in Tompkins County and it is almost always a single-seat ride to Cornell and to the downtown area. Transfers in the downtown-Cornell-Mall triangle are also easy because you can always get a bus in 15 minutes or less.
Overall transit works great if most people are going to a few central points. It's much more difficult if the destinations are distributed. Frequent service could be a balm for that: if you had buses every ten minutes on all routes transfers would not be bad at all.
Concrete example for my city. Going from the east end to the west end took over 2 hours. And most of it was on the rail system - so not competing with traffic. But it involved one transfer for the train, and another for the bus near the end of my destination.
Frequent stops - by both the train and the bus, as well as the stops, made it take a lot longer. In my case a car would have done it in about 40 minutes.
Overall transit works great if most people are going to a few central points. It's much more difficult if the destinations are distributed. Frequent service could be a balm for that: if you had buses every ten minutes on all routes transfers would not be bad at all.