The shortcomings of American bus systems are not lost on transportation planners. The adage of "getting what you pay for" appears to be mostly true.
In Boise (Idaho), journalist Robert Ehlert writes about a recent experience riding Valley Transit, the local bus transit system. That experience illustrated the following observations:
If you look at the evolution of most big-city transportation systems, they started with buses — and still include them in the spoke-and-wheel infrastructure that allows them to deliver people to their destinations. Today, the [Treasure] Valley is operating with essentially the same bus system that served it in the 1990s — even though the places of growth and employment are more widely dispersed in many new directions. Before we aspire to ride anything else into the future, we had better learn to support and patronize the interim means: the bus.
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