Last night, from one of the couches at The Borough, I watched as an old man waited, with his bicycle, for the R line, Raleigh’s new (“free!”) downtown circulator bus.
By the time he caught my notice, I think the man had already been waiting about 10 minutes. 30 minutes after that, still no bus, so he finally got on his bike and rode away. 2 minutes later, the bus showed up, immediately followed by another one. (There are 2 R-Line buses that are, theoretically, always at opposites sides of the circular route.)
This could only happen with a public service. Private buses would have much stronger incentives to actually serve their customers.