"That would be a waste of money. Building transit lines without people to ride them means that they reach their end of useful life from old age without serving enough people to be worth them."

Agreed. Forgive me - what I meant was, build new transit lines on point to point routes that already make sense, then in-fill the intermediate stops as needed.

Those in-fill stations can then be the anchors for transit oriented, high density development which completes the cycle because the line is already in place.

I think they have basically succeeded with this in the University St. Paul <--> MPLS lightrail route. The route already made sense point-to-point and now they can choose the intermediate stops that make sense to organically grow the corridor.