Now you're just confusing things. If you want to talk about populations that bus services serve, it only makes sense to include those areas that the service serves directly otherwise where do you draw the line? I would say that Mississauga Transit serves a city of 620,000 people, not a city of 3.6 million because people on Oakville Transit, Brampton Transit, and the TTC have the opportunity of transferring on to MT.
Wow... a semantics argument. Really quite pointless.