The challenge here is riding the bus is inferior in convenience and comfort, fundamentally, vs other options. Unless price (likely by eliminating any subsidies for other methods; today even a $0 bus fare would still not be enough) or other features (bypassing traffic) make up for it, why would a rational person take the bus? There are probably places on the margin where buses are more acceptable right now (in a downtown core area where they replace a long walk, where other methods are inconvenient), but if the goal is wide usage, this has to be addressed.
Private bus networks with access limited to certain people (employees of companies or groups of companies, universities, etc) seem to work ok; what generally doesn’t seem to work are public buses.
Is the problem density (I doubt Google employees across Bay Area are denser than bus riding public overall within SF) — probably not.
A lot of the unpleasantness is other riders. Without the ability to ban certain riders (either via a whitelist or blacklist), bus ridership will remain limited. BART is bad enough, but whenever I’ve taken muni or peninsula bus service (very rarely)it made the case for this.
Transit agencies are also highly political — unionized labor, political appointees running it, expensive contracts for everything, inflexible policies — so I doubt they could provide the same service as private bus companies.
The solution is probably not public transit, but possibly is multi passenger vehicles. Something like Lyft Line with more passengers, dynamic routing, etc, plus some core routes with scheduled higher capacity service.
I've been in a number of cities where I don't find buses inferior. For me it's even often my personally preferred means of transit, though I've of course ridden my share of poor buses too.
The good case is when they're: frequent, run on arterial routes (no meandering), don't stop excessively often, have routes designed to avoid big bottlenecks like left-turn waits (or have strategically placed bus-only bypasses for those trouble spots), stop in the rightmost travel lane rather than in pullout bays that require merging back into traffic, and have a streamlined payment system (the last two combining to give low dwell times at stops). Doesn't even have to be BRT, but let's say halfway to BRT.
Two cities with those kinds of buses that I've personally experienced recently: Washington, DC, which has nice arterial routes up/down main roads like Massachusetts Ave and 16th St, and Copenhagen, which has a network of "A bus" [1] routes.
I live in Copenhagen, and I prefer public transport (primarily buses) because I don't have to worry about finding and paying for a parking space or getting home drunk from a night out. It's also significantly less expensive than owning a car. I spent 4x the cost of my transit card[1] every month in gas alone, never mind maintenance and insurance costs.
I would have to walk significantly further from most parking garages to where I'm going, that from the nearest bus stop.
This talk of banning certain people is nonsense. The whole point of public transport is that it's for everyone. And what you're suggesting with "multi passenger vehicles" already exist in many countries. Here we call the "telebus", and it's working quite well in less densely populated areas. Just you know, without the rampant disregard for workers that Uber and Lyft display.
[1] Unlimited traveling in the city zone and the zone I live in for DKK375/month ($60).
> Private bus networks with access limited to certain people (employees of companies or groups of companies, universities, etc) seem to work ok; what generally doesn’t seem to work are public buses.
This sounds like an argument for restricting transit access to the most privileged members of society. The real reason private buses are successful is because they have a limited amount of stops, it's more like riding a train than a local bus that stops at every block. If anything cities should be investing way more in BRT, as the private sector has proven that high quality buses can work.
The public “express buses” seem to have most of the same problems. This is possibly due to inflexibility in how/where they are deployed, or riders, or other factors.
Diesel buses are very energy efficient. Electrified rail is surprisingly inefficient.
Building bus rapid transit lanes makes more sense than spinning up a light rail infrastructure almost any way you measure: capital costs, energy, maintenance, flexibility...
I also wonder how much sense intercity rail even makes for most trips. If you could set aside a lane for buses only on I-95 Boston to DC (for example), you could have a bunch of routes that go directly from various neighborhoods to other neighborhoods at mostly 110 mph.
Really depends on ridership. There's also pollution other than just energy inefficiency; old diesel buses with low ridership put a lot of particulates and other pollution into the air, compared to the same number of passengers in the newest petrol (or cleaner diesel, or obviously electric) cars.
Sure, an older diesel bus with just 2-3 people on board is obviously less efficient than a car with 2-3 people on board.
But you also have to factor in that most buses run for a lot longer than the average car, sometimes decades and millions of kilometers. Most of the time they're not even "put to pasture" because they're worn out, but because newer buses are more efficient and have more creature comforts. So the older buses are brought in when for instance there is rail maintenance and you have to replace a train line with buses. In comes the old stock, still pulling its weight.
This also ties in to the environmental load of producing new cars/buses, you need a lot less raw material to make a bus that moves 60 people, compared to the cars needed to move 60 people.
That's why old stock is cycled out regularly, to improve efficiency and reduce pollution on the busiest lines. The the older buses get moved to more sparse routes, with less busy schedules and less stop-and-go.
Where I live, a surprisingly big problem is actually that too many people ride the buses during rush hour. Sometimes you just have to wait for the next bus to come and hopefully have some space for you. I'll admit that's really a luxury problem to have.
Public transport is vastly better for the environment and for congestion, unless nobody uses it. That takes investment, but politicians are way too quick to say "well no one's using it now, why should we invest?".
Not really. You are underestimating the massive energy efficiency advantages of modern diesel engines, across many contexts. It's the same reason why water pumps and freight locomotives and all kinds of other equipment that could theoretically be electrified isn't.
Well then why is the water in your city pumped by diesel engines, and why are all the goods delivered by diesel locomotives, barges, and trucks? The entire logistics industry is just full of morons that didn't get the memo over the last 80 years that electrified motors are better than diesel?
No, they use diesel motors for almost a century because they are more efficient and cost effective.
The water in my city sure as hell isn't pumped by diesel power.
As for the rest, that is due to historical reason, back when those networks were established, we didn't have the electrical grid and power available. We do now.
The main reason they still use diesel is because it's cheaper to keep the existing gear running, rather than replacing everything. Electric trains are so much more efficient (in modern kV systems), it's not even funny.
Public buses do work well in a few cities. London and Manchester. Vancouver seems good. Maybe San Francisco. Ok very few cities.
The problem is you need a critical mass of people using them before anyone puts any real effort into making them not awful.
There are too many cities that have a few rubbish busses, but they aren't on Google Maps, they don't have live departure boards at bus stops, everybody pays in cash, they follow terrible routes that cater to people with no alternative (children and OAPs), they're infrequent and unreliable, no bus lanes, etc. etc.
That said I don't think the future of transport is busses. They're just too slow and shit in general.
Private bus networks with access limited to certain people (employees of companies or groups of companies, universities, etc) seem to work ok; what generally doesn’t seem to work are public buses.
Is the problem density (I doubt Google employees across Bay Area are denser than bus riding public overall within SF) — probably not.
A lot of the unpleasantness is other riders. Without the ability to ban certain riders (either via a whitelist or blacklist), bus ridership will remain limited. BART is bad enough, but whenever I’ve taken muni or peninsula bus service (very rarely)it made the case for this.
Transit agencies are also highly political — unionized labor, political appointees running it, expensive contracts for everything, inflexible policies — so I doubt they could provide the same service as private bus companies.
The solution is probably not public transit, but possibly is multi passenger vehicles. Something like Lyft Line with more passengers, dynamic routing, etc, plus some core routes with scheduled higher capacity service.