Comment by bluGill
7 days ago
We can call them a bus...
Most suburbs are dense enough to have demand for full sized buses if service is good. The cost of a bus means that cities don't give them good service, but automated bus drivers would reduce the costs enough that they could run good service and this in turn will get so many people to use the bus instead of driving that the van could not work.
For rural areas a van might make sense, though you quickly get to a frequent van is less efficient than just owning your own van.
Smaller vehicles allow more dynamic dispatch. SF buses are low quality transport because they have to stop every block to allow for an elderly local population. With vans, you can put more of them on the road and dynamic dispatch allows them to skip stops for non-loading.
This structure allows for greater QoS through the system. Almost any sufficiently dense place without regulation limiting it approaches a mix of larger buses on fixed routes with smaller vehicles on slightly less fixed routes.
SF Muni has a 13% absence rate. Without the driver we can have more vehicles, more often, and on-time every time. Once we can do that, we can vary the size of the vehicles to cover different routes and to allow for QoS.
That is a horrible idea and shows how little you care or think about bus riders. Bus riders need predictable. If the but has dynamic dispatach you can't trust it will get you there on time. We need predictable routes with minimal variance so everyone gets predictable. Good qos is predictable.
> Good qos is predictable.
Definitely. I've found rideshare type service to be much more predictable because it is isn't subject to bus bunching and can route around traffic.
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Yep, but I think automated bus drivers change the math. A standard-ish city bus is $1M and seats 50 (though they're rarely full). You could definitely get 5 vans that would seat 6 for $1M. Absolute seating capacity is lower, but total throughput could be greater because of the extra flexibility.
That doesn't work. If you run frequent service more people will use it and so you still need the big bus.
> A standard-ish city bus is $1M and seats 50 (though they're rarely full).
This sounds wrong, or at least your local transport company is being ripped off. Dublin Bus bought 600 plug-in hybrid double-deckers a few years back at a unit cost of 450,000 eur; they take about 90 people. More recently it bought a couple hundred electric buses of the same size for 500k apiece (though of course these are cheaper to run).
Also, define 'rarely full'. At rush hour, most buses will be full for at least part of their route.
Taken as an example, Dublin Bus has 1,100 buses, almost all ~90 person double deckers (homeopathic numbers of smaller single-deckers and giant three-axle double-deckers can be ignored). Let's say 90% are operating at peak time. That's a capacity of 89,000 people on the road; implementing your plan with 6 person vans would require about 15,000 vans. This is obviously completely absurd.
(The original claim that they were good _train_ substitutes is even more absurd; replacing a 1,000 person rapid transit train would require 166 vans. Which is multiple kilometres of vans. On a decent metro line such as train might arrive every 3 minutes. There is just no way you can do that with vans.