Make riding safe and clean too. No more junkies smoking fentanyl and stabbing people or screaming obscenities.
Similar chicken-egg problem there too, if such events drive people off, there becomes an even higher concentration of such encounters which drives more people off.
It wouldn’t matter how many people ride the bus in my town. They lose money as it is, and adding more service would widen the losses.
That's mostly a chicken-egg problem, if more people rode the bus there would be way more frequent stops and more nearby ones.