[PaulHoule]

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.

[BeetleB]

Yes, but Cornell lives in a small city.

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.