If you look at all the major cities of the world with good public transport infrastructure, they will all be densely populated. I don't think that is a coincidence.
Bus Rapid Transit is super cheap and you can have the lines run anywhere. You just have to be willing to give up lanes of traffic.
Yet, LA has obviously done so.
Relatedly: Is it actually cost-prohibitive to run bus lines?
Angelinos are paying the price for it in their time, their health and with their wallets. However, I think moving LA towards higher density development (similar to a New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin) is the correct approach.
Why are people spending 2 hours in traffic and commuting 50 miles each way, every day? It is because housing is un-affordable closer to the jobs. Even run down houses in crime ridden neighborhoods are ridiculously priced.
And how do you suppose LA does that? LA isn't a centralized city. Relatively little of it's business and traffic is going to DTLA specifically. People are going to Pasadena, Santa Monica, Culver City, Encino, Sherman Oaks, West Hollywood, etc and they're all coming from various places (SGV, South LA, the Valley). All higher density development would do is exacerbate the issue, we need the public infrastructure to catch up so it can handle higher densities.
It doesn't help that transit costs 4x-7x as much to build in the US vs Spain. It also doesn't help that nobody cares about good investments - republicans hate transit and won't invest in anything if they can avoid it. Democrats love the idea of transit and waste a lot of money on slow, expensive lines to nowhere that nobody rides thus proving the republicans right that transit is a bad investment.
Prioritize dense, mixed-use development within ~.5 miles of transit hubs. Every new subway/light-rail station should include rezoning with a focus on a livable mix of commercial, residential, and retail.
Remove parking minimums. Let the market determine how much parking is available and how much it costs. Plentiful, free parking is not a right.
Remove single-family zoning (allow accessory dwelling units and duplexes in existing SFH zones).
None of this will work overnight. It will take years. But, the basic goal is to make living near work achievable and desirable.
Once in LA itself the buses have the same problem of not being able to really drive on the smaller side streets so they're limited to the big avenues. That makes them slightly better than LA's trains but still a pain for a majority of riders. LA doesn't have the space in most places for dedicated bus lanes with above-grade platforms.
Note that LA has lots of bus lines but commuting on them is tedious and slow. Getting where you need to go usually requires several transfers then travel on foot to your actual destination. For most commutes it takes at least as long as driving.
Shuttle buses (24-28 occupants) do quite well on twisty suburban roads. Those same roads often have curbside parking, and delimiting a 30-foot stretch of road as a bus stop is not going to seriously hamper that.
In Vancouver, the cost to operate regular buses, per revenue-hour (time the bus is carrying passengers) is ~$120/hour. The cost of operating shuttle buses is ~$70/hour. [1] This is because smaller buses use less gas, are cheaper to maintain, and have better labour utilization (Time the driver spends on the clock driving passengers, versus time the driver spends on the clock waiting around, switching routes, etc.)
And this is operational costs. Capital costs are another huge factor, that's not accounted for in the operational numbers. It costs a lot more to order an 80-passenger bus (And even more so for a trolley), then it does a 24-passenger one.
Also, this is only anecdotal, from being a rider, but I'm pretty sure that shuttle-buses both perform better in congested environments, and cause less traffic congestion (As they have a much better power-to-weight ratio, better acceleration and breaking, a smaller turning radius...)
[1] https://www.translink.ca/-/media/Documents/about_translink/g...
The capital costs of the bus isn't that much different over the lifespan of a bus. If you need a large bus at all, then it is cheaper to buy one large bus than both the large and small. Small buses cost less mostly because the drivers don't have to be as well trained - I'm not sure I want that difference.
This worked because shuttlebus service was slowly ramped up year over year.
The small buses are solely used for last mile suburban routes, the large buses for anything else.
I'm not saying LA should be this way, it just is this way. The suburban sprawl makes most of Southern California a shit show for public transit. Cities with effective public transit tend to have higher population densities at least more concentrated commercial areas. In SoCal (tired of typing it out) places where jobs are located are distributed all throughout the sprawl. There's no real "downtown" where all the jobs are located.
It also doesn't help that due to earthquake and fire codes it's rare to see mixed zoning in much of California. So few neighborhoods with ground floor commercial/retail and upper floor residential zoning.
On my commute to work I see buses from half a dozen different agencies, the fact that every individual city in the metro area seems to run its own bus service is probably another piece of the problem.
They're usually placed due to politics, not maximal utility.