The problem with these underperforming projects is also that you have a kind of bistable equilibrium here. I don't use the bus to work because it only goes onc

The problem with these underperforming projects is also that you have a kind of bistable equilibrium here. I don't use the bus to work because it only goes once every half hour, and since it's stuck in city traffic the schedule is completely random. If there were more buses on this route (e.g. one every 5 minutes), I would not care about the randomness, since whenever I arrive a bus should be there soon. But the transit authority doesn't add buses because there's a low number of passengers on this route, even though there are thousands working at my company that may take the same bus but opt for a car. Public transit only becomes viable once it's densely connected and frequent enough to be useful. But to get out of this rut you need massive investment. For this reason any individual public transit projects in the US will always underperform IMHO. You're in one of two equilibria and it's massive costs with little return until you get to the better equilibrium on the other aide, but this would need broad political support to happen.