And you are here why?

Jarrett Walker makes the point that public-transit decisions are not made in a vacuum, that there are actual tradeoffs that need to be made between Ridership  and Coverage. If public transit agencies were charged  exclusively  with maximizing their ridership, and all the green benefits that follow from that, they could move their empty buses to run in places where they’d be full.  Every competent transit planner knows how to do this.  Just abandon all service in low-density areas, typically outer suburbs, and shift all these resources to run even more frequent and attractive service where densities are high, such as inner cities.  In lower-density areas, you’d run only narrowly tailored services for brief surges of demand, such as trips to schools at bell-times and commuter express runs from suburban Park-and-Rides to downtown Mind you, this goes dead against the idea of Coverage  - if you told the people who were squawking about "empty trains...

Lets talk about Zero Sum games.  (Hooray!  This is going to be fun! ) Less sarcasm please. Seriously, lets take a look at the economy of a country.  Broadly speaking, you have the Public Sector and the Private Sector Public Sector :  Also known as Gummint .  This is all the money spent by the Gummint to do whatever the heck that Gummints do. Private Sector :  Everything that isn't the Gummint.  All the goods, service and whatever else that goes on in the country.  Mind you, this even includes the underground economy , i.e., you pay the local kid $20 to mow your lawn, and don't give him a 1099. So, where does the Gummint get its money?  I mean, they have to pay the Army, Congress, DMV, etc, right? The first (and actually quite wrong) answer is " They print it ".  Which is kinda sorta vaguely true, except that its actually none of them, and is in fact quite false. The government gets all (actually most , but more on that i...