Reply #6: One really good idea that Portland has

[Lydia Leftcoast]

taken as an intermediate step is to designate certain principal lines as "frequent service" lines, buses running a minimum of every 15 minutes, seven days a week, eighteen hours a day.

I lived in a neighborhood that happened to be served by two such lines. It was great, and a lot of elderly people used them, yes, to go shopping. The lines had "kneeling" buses, buses with no-step entrances and wheelchair lifts whose chassis could be lowered to about six inches off the ground to let older people on.

On the matter of inter-city rail, we'll soon be embarrassed by China. I haven't checked in lately, but China is considering a Japanese proposal to build a bullet train from Shanghai to Beijing. Korea and Taiwan are already modernizing their rail systems, and Singapore and Hong Kong, which are too small for inter-city rail, are modernizing their public transit.