Comment by jsnell
1 day ago
I didn't really mean that they needed higher capacity. If they had the passenger volume to justify such high intervals, they'd already have real trams.
But rather, this is giving up the benefit trams have over buses, without gaining any new edge to replace it. So why is it a good tradeoff? And why now, not 20 years ago?
The autonomous driving angle is the only idea I have.
A bus cannot be run ever two minutes. No amount of dispatch anywhere has pulled that off. I'm not sure if a tram can be run that often but subways are
Bus Rapid Transits can operate at frequencies of about 10 seconds per bus. Obviously they're highly parallelised to achieve that and have special infrastructure to enable it like dedicated stations and pedestrian access, so it's not just "a bus", but bus-based systems are how many of the very highest-throughput public transportation lines function, with up to 35000 people per hour per direction with three digit numbers of buses per hour.
For comparison, the most frequent London underground service is 100 seconds per train and the system moves about 50k passengers an hour (based on a 21% increase representing 10k passengers, I couldn't find a direct figure), presumably that being both directions.
What single BRT line runs at that capacity?
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I've used a bus service that ran buses every five minutes. It was eventually replaced by a tram.
I don’t know if two minutes are possible, but in Berne, Switzerland, the bus line 10 runs every three minutes. Parts of the loop have dedicated bus lanes, but it‘s probably less than a third of the distance.
PDF: https://www.bernmobil.ch/sites/default/files/2025-02/ah_0201...
Buses can hit that on interleaved lines. Here is a bus lane in downtown LA that moves 70 buses an hour:
https://x.com/metrolosangeles/status/1153807208229957632