"People say the outer district doesn't need a bus line because the road counters show almost no traffic there," the transit planner told me. "But those counters are set into the asphalt and register axles. They measure cars, not the latent demand of residents who own no vehicle and therefore never appear on that road at all." She pulled up a household survey: nearly a third of the district owned no car, and their trips—to clinics, night shifts, schools—were being walked for two hours or quietly abandoned. "A road that counts only what already moves will always conclude that nothing wants to move. Absence in a car-shaped instrument is not absence of need; it is the shape of the instrument." She wanted the district judged by where people had to go, not by what the pavement could already see.