Comment by xnx
7 days ago
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.