[jcranmer]

> You have a neighborhood with three dozen people in it

The average household size in the US is about 4. Three dozen people means 9 houses. That's not really a neighborhood, and most people don't live in that kind of low-density.

Picking a random cul-de-sac street somewhere in North Carolina (ended up being near Cary, NC), as representative of what a suburban/exurban density environment would look like, it has 22 houses on it by itself. Just guessing where I'd plop a bus stop on a collector road, there's 4 similarly-sized cul-de-sacs within walking distance, and a similar number of houses on the collector road. So that bus stop is going to have 100 houses it can service, or about 300-400-ish people.

One of the primary problems with transit discourse in the US is that people (on both sides!) tend to view transit as a Manhattan-or-Cimmaron-County density dichotomy, thinking that transit is unviable except in the highest density regions. But my point is that transit is absolutely viable at the density available in exurban, even a lot of "rural" regions (although that's rural more like Berkshires rural rather than Oklahoma rural). And because not a lot of people actually live in the lowest density regions where public transit is unviable... it doesn't actually matter: most people live some place where public transit is viable.