Putting in even a single stop at a rural town could easily add 30 minutes each way to the route. Probably more, getting from a hub city to these rural towns is a good amount of driving with not much of anything between. A bus that stops at a rural 500 person town once every hour or so isn’t moving enough people to be more efficient than cars. Now you want to do that for every town surrounding a hub city? The economy of scale simply doesn’t exist for rural areas. Even suburbs stretch that a bit.
![[image] Cars are an incredibly inefficient way to move people](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a55ce0e0-9740-4207-9d5f-64bc68231a3d.jpeg){kind=link}
Putting in even a single stop at a rural town could easily add 30 minutes each way to the route. Probably more, getting from a hub city to these rural towns is a good amount of driving with not much of anything between. A bus that stops at a rural 500 person town once every hour or so isn’t moving enough people to be more efficient than cars. Now you want to do that for every town surrounding a hub city? The economy of scale simply doesn’t exist for rural areas. Even suburbs stretch that a bit.