It's surprising to me that you would need to wait 30 minutes for a bus. Are you in a very rural area? Was it outside of normal commute hours? Or is your city's public transportation network wildly underfunded?

Are you European or American? To a lot of America, that is considered a good numbers. Its worse in many parts of this vastly large country. The country has chosen to invest heavily in road networks. It appears that you can have one or the other but not both without great expense and reform.

I like to remind my European friends that this is what the US looks like placed on top of Europe: https://i.imgur.com/HkRZfKd.png

Its not a perfect illustration but it drives home the point.

Wildly underfunded? I don't think so.

America underfunded? Yes.

There are three buses that go from the main depot to my office. They all arrived in a line back to back to back, picked up zero passengers, and went their merry way.

I watched this happen from one block over, waiting for the stoplight to change so I could cross the street and catch any of them. Unfortunately, since they were all moving in a blob, the next blob was going to be around in 30 minutes instead of the average 10 minutes one might expect from a non-blob arrangement.

But that part of the story was anecdote. The more relevant part was that in the event of disruption of the infrastructure solution, modern cellular radio and digital technology let us ad hoc book a one-off service solution on the fly, and that is so convenient that the people who facilitate it can get away with some massive wealth extraction as a result.