収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

What makes you think mass transit agencies or advocates aren't interested in commuters? Lines are selected based on commuting routes, and commuters are the largest single chunk of passengers. Yes, even in Portland. (On the other hand, commuting only makes up around a third of all trips people make, so it's not the only thing to consider.)

One thing that's common among a lot of people whether they favor mass transit or cars is that they see their preferred method of transportation in isolation. Good transportation solutions would worry about moving people, and then select the best methods to accomplish that, rather than starting with a method and then pigeonholing people into it. That requires thinking about how cars, roads, and mass transit interact. If you just build more roads because you want to cater to motorists, you create sprawl without reducing commute times. If you just build rail lines because you're unhappy about the fixation on cars, you ignore the wishes of potential passengers on your system. An integrated system realizes that every car pool, bus, and train passenger who isn't in a car improves the efficiency of the system even for the people still in their cars. An efficient system promotes those behaviors while still giving people the choice for personal transit (i.e. cars) so long as they pay their fair share of the costs imposed on others by their decision. In other words, tolls and congestion pricing so that there's a market in choosing efficient means of commuting.

You can't just look at a bus or train system and say it's inefficient because it's not adding new riders. If the number of riders stay the same but the result is a better commute for everyone involved, that's worthwhile.