This strikes me as sort of a chicken and the egg problem – do you lower fares to increase ridership or do you increase ridership to lower fares?  The editorial acknowledges the issue of access, though, which seems to me to be more and more important the further you get from the Seattle metro area.

I’m lucky in that I live in an area where there’s at least five routes that run through regularly to various areas (a good chunk of them to the UW), but that wasn’t true in Olympia, where I was so far away from bus access that it was a literal impossibility to use the system, even if it was substantially cheaper than driving.