The decline of public/mass transit in Indianapolis

I wrote this as a part of a discussion with a professional colleague about public and private transportation in urban areas.

Having grown up in Indianapolis (in the 1950s/1960s) and as I am living there again (since 2012) in my retirement, I have a perspective on the changes that have affected one bus system,

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the bus routes were fairly simple:  most traffic was from "periphery" locations and to the city center.  Employment was concentrated "downtown"; this was pre-suburban-mall days (at least for Indy), so major retail shopping was also centralized.  So the bus routes were essentially designed to channel traffic to the city center.  Indy's remarkably regular grid street system meant some of that involved transferring from one bus route (the north-south routes, typically) to another (east-west).  The population was also concentrated.  Marion County is basically square, and it's divided into 9 townships, remarkably like a tic-tac-toe grid.  By 1960, the county had about 670,000 residents--and about  50% of them lived in Center Twp.  So a bus system that concentrated on the closer-in parts of the city, and getting people to-and-from the CBD was pretty efficient.  (Also, about 20% of the households were still car-less in the late 1950s.)

Today...the county population is about 950,000.  And only 142,000 people live in Center Township.  Retail locations are now spread, and, in terms of things like "big-box" and malls, most likely to be located on the periphery, as is "office" employment. The relevant structure for a bus system is hugely more complicated, involving periphery-to-center much less and periphery-to-periphery much more.   Auto ownership is almost universal (but not so nearly universal for lower income households).   And bus patronage has declined--quite dramatically:  from 64 million passenger trips in 1950 to 25 million in 1960 to about 7 million in 2017.  Suburbanization and hollowing out of the urban core, the construction of interstate highways nearly to, and encircling, the city center, and the now almost universal access to cars--and the bus system has come close to collapse, and I see no way to salvage it.

And the principal discussion for transit is to use abandoned rail lines from the two largest ex-urban citied as the platform for light rail.  There is no bus service from those two cities--now both over 100,000 in population (and outside the central county).