It's actually not half as bad for rural residents as it is usually presented by car addicts: for those amongst rural residents who would be interested in making their cumbersome trips using public transit, subscription in conventional price models were usually prohibitively expensive. They basically took distance based single ticket price, scaled by "what if it was used for the full trip five days a week?" and applied some discount. They were offered bad service at high price. In some places 10x the price a city dweller would have to pay for their short range subscription. Sure, many out there won't buy it even at the lower price, but for those who do is a much bigger improvement over the status quo than for a city dweller. For many city dwellers, it will in fact be nothing more than an upsell option to the ticket they already have, pay more (in some places twice as much) for a ticket that will also be valid for the occasional trip out of town.