My town built a north-south buss that has it's own street for most of the route. It ran every 10 min and was pretty useful and popular. During covid they quit charging fare and also changed to 20min frequency.

  Now you may have to wait 40 min for a round trip depending on when you get to the station.  This makes it hard to use the bus for a lunch errand where you need to be back in an hour.

I think the fare + high frequency system worked better.