One thing about highways/transit is that people conceptually overestimate highway capacity, let alone actual usage in rural areas.. A highway lane operating at perfect capacity can maybe do 1800 cars per hour. Fewer than capacity is fewer, too many cars means congestion and therefore much less capacity, and obviously things like on/off ramps and accidents slow things down quite a bit, especially on older more poorly designed highways (they have gotten better at this). So if a transit line is hosting 26,000 riders per day, that's roughly equivalent to a highly used highway lane.
My urban hellhole has two heavy rail subway lines. The north-south one, especially, is definitely underutilized, but even it gets 135,000 daily weekday riders.
