The current alternative is to plan your day and drive family members around (or get more cars, and car insurance up here is both mandatory and quite expensive, at several hundred dollars per month)
Buses are a great transportation solution for metropolitan areas, but here you're looking at a half million dollar bill per bus line per year for a rural town of 36k people. There's really no economic benefit to running such an expensive public service. Subsidizing a taxi-oriented system makes a lot more sense here.
Busses aren't actually all that great in general, lets be realistic. Out on the islands here in Washington State, that have dial a ride with call buttons at each stop, hailing a small bus or van within 10 or 15 minutes.
Uber could easily deploy something like this, and it'd cover 90% of the issues I just mentioned.
Sorry, not familiar with that area. How metropolitan is that? When I say metropolitan, I mean something like downtown Toronto, where ridership averages about 3M people per day.
Buses are a great transportation solution for metropolitan areas, but here you're looking at a half million dollar bill per bus line per year for a rural town of 36k people. There's really no economic benefit to running such an expensive public service. Subsidizing a taxi-oriented system makes a lot more sense here.