> I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false.

...but then your "In my experience..." section repeats the article's assertions? As in, everything you list as a drawback of riding the bus is exactly what the article claims can be improved by intelligently cutting out some percentage of stops.

Also, I didn't see the claim that "too many stops is the main cause of low ridership." That would be an overreach. The central claim that I see is that optimizing the number of stops, which turns out to result in a net reduction in pretty much all major American cities, is a relatively easy way to marginally improve many aspects of bus systems.

I think your counterarguments are valid, but they're just fleshing out the article's thesis. Simply reducing bus stops and holding everything else constant would not magically improve ridership and the overall experience. And as you say, reducing bus stops and removing money supporting the system will definitely not result in improvements. (And I agree that it is the likely way it would transpire politically.)

You would need to reduce stops and direct the savings into improving the remaining stops. You would need to convert the change into more reliable schedules. To make sense, that would need to increase ridership, and adjust the demographics of riders to include people who don't have to accept "dirty, unsafe and hostile" because they have no other choice. There's little incentive to improve things when the audience is captive and powerless. Also, increased ridership leads to more resources to accomplish the rest.

Of course, the dependencies between all these changes make the improvements more speculative and harder to achieve politically, so I do agree that you can't "just" reduce the number of stops and improve everything. As you said, that would more likely just drain more blood from an already anemic system. But the article is talking about a relatively cheap and easy way to improve things; everything else transit agencies can do is harder and/or more expensive.

> So while the number of bus stops might matter at the margins, we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter. If you want to improve ridership, you need to make the bus an attractive option for more people.

That first sentence says marginal improvements won't matter. The second sentence says that marginal improvements ("an attractive option for more people") are what are needed. Maybe you're saying that marginal improvements have to reach a threshold in order to be worth doing or achieve any noticeable gains?