This is exactly what gets car-centric infrastructure built in the first place. It makes sense.
But then as an American metro area grows, the car-centric solution is sticky and public transit seems impossible to build later. I one-way commute 55 miles by car twice a week and there is no vaguely sensible public transit option. I'm doing rings around the SF Bay Area. The public transit should be better around here by now.
It isn't impossible. People would be more than happy to use public transit for e.g. commuting, if metro made public transit for commuting.
I wouldn't mind the HOV lane being buses-only and having ramps to bused-only lanes/roads if it also meant busses were faster and highways only needed 2 lanes of travel lanes instead of 4+.
The problem is there's no money in doing it until you get enough ridership, and your not going to get ridership from "tweaking" the routes like most cities try. And no one wants to spend more tax money on the homeless transportation plan.
It's just a shitshow, and there won't be improvement until the chicken and egg cycle can be broken.
I feel like many public transit systems in the US are designed as radial lines from a city center (constant theta, varying r) and relatively few axial/circular routes (constant r, varying theta).
Car routes (and placement of shops and offices) take advantage of the random route ability of cars to specifically avoid the downtown congestion, enshrining the “quick and convenient to drive from one suburb to the neighboring suburb, but incredibly painful to use public transit for that trip”.
Buses suffer a time penalty naturally along their route, but if you add a “take a bus in a direction you don’t want to go, change buses, take that bus back-tracking the wasted motion, and only then get closer to your destination”, it’s pretty much bound to suck.
In Japan and Europe, I’ve seen more axial service lines and/or more of a mesh covering the areas rather than a bicycle spokes looking transit map.
But then as an American metro area grows, the car-centric solution is sticky and public transit seems impossible to build later. I one-way commute 55 miles by car twice a week and there is no vaguely sensible public transit option. I'm doing rings around the SF Bay Area. The public transit should be better around here by now.