> One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US.

That's not what I read. The article is saying that you can get meaningful service improvements via what is essentially a free measure: cutting the number of stops. I personally regularly take a route in San Francisco that would unquestionably be better off by cutting a swathe of stops through the Mission, where it stops every two blocks on a street with painful light cycles and tons of pedestrian traffic.

The result is that by the afternoon, two or three buses on this route have piled up, one right behind the other, and passengers have to wait 45 minutes for the next one if they miss one of those.