I feel like you have completely mischaracterized the main thesis of this article, and thus I couldn't disagree more.

A primary issue of buses competing with other forms of transportation is simply that they're too slow, and the main thrust of the article is that intelligently reducing the the number of stops only increases walking time a very small amount but can reduce travel time significantly.

This is certainly my main issue with taking buses sometimes - I often think taking a bus would be easier than driving (e.g. no parking, I could read or do something else while traveling, etc.), and I'd be willing to do that is the bus took, say, 1.5x driving time, but often times it's just much slower than driving.