zlacker

One interesting thing I think I've noticed is that public buses in general in the U.S. kind of suck compared to elsewhere. The reason why I think I've hit on is that they kind of don't have a place to go, and so most bus routes kind of meander around their local areas going nowhere in particular. It turns short, as-the-crow-flies, trips into long ones. Anecdotally, I've lived in places where it's literally faster to walk slowly between two locations than take the bus -- the car alternative was less than 1/5th of the bus time.

However, once an area builds real transit, like lightrail, or a subway or something, there's pressure to integrate the systems, and suddenly bus routes will optimize to connect people with those systems.

This is completely anecdotal, but I've noticed massive bus route redesigns in a couple places where transit comes on-line. A 45 minute meandering bus "loop" turning into a 15 minute direct route to the local transit station, which also works well for commuting as offices tend to be in high-density commercial zones near transit so the total commute time is within spitting distance of just driving.

>>bane+(OP)
This might be by design - if you have a small amount of buses and drivers, then to service a given area one has to have a small amount of long routes. If there was more money to go around, there could be more drivers, more buses , ability to have more routes, maybe even enough to have a hub and spoke system of routes, maybe even some long “useless” long loop routes too. But since bus services are operated like a business, they often don’t get to expand far enough to be really useful because there isn’t enough demand with the bad routing model to accrue enough capital to grow into usefulness.