Those who labored for many years to get a bypass constructed around Knightdale will tell you getting the N.C. Department of Transportation to move quickly in meeting a need is darn near impossible.

So it is unlikely to expect that a meeting held earlier this month will produce much fruit in the short term.

The mayors and managers of all three eastern Wake County towns met with representatives of several state and regional transportation organizations to push for bus service in eastern Wake County.

The service wouldn’t be anything akin to the Capital Area Transportation system that ferries people around Raleigh.

Instead, it would be an express service, something that picks people up at only a few specific times during the day and only at a few points along the route and takes them to Raleigh where they can access the more frequent CAT system.

Area transportation officials have agreed to consider the idea. Part of that consideration will no doubt include studies of the population density in eastern Wake County and a review of the total population in this area.

What transportation officials will likely find is that those figures aren’t high enough to justify the cost of sending buses to the hinterlands of Wake County.

Just now, the town of Wake Forest appears likely to get a similar sort of service, but that town has mushroomed to 25,000 people in a single suburban area with tens of thousands more people in the immediate vicinity.

As one mayor pointed out, more people will become interested in bus service as the cost of gasoline creeps closer to $4 a gallon.

But the promise of a fickle public, to make use of mass transportation service, is not likely to sway the people with the power of the purse.

Until eastern Wake County draws closer to developing out, and potential bus riders are close enough to a bus stop to make it worthwhile, local leaders would be better served by working with agencies like the Department of Human Services to arrange for sufficient transportation to meet the demand of the relatively small number of people who would use it.

And, they could push the county to provide even more services through the Eastern Regional Center, a facility that serves this area remarkably well already.