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Comment by danaw

21 hours ago

how many people can fit in a bus compared to a car?

Doesn't matter if there's only four people willing to ride on a given schedule.

  • That is an argument for buses on well-designed routes and schedules, not an argument against buses.

    It is like saying “that bus would be useless at the bottom of a lake”

    well, yeah. The first step would be not driving it into a lake

    • It depends on the population density. You may have a perfectly well designed route for the area, but there are only so many people per hour that want to take a trip. You can delete routes and make people walk further, but that makes the trip take longer and not everyone can or wants to walk a long ways to the bus stop.

      Different population densities have different optimal vehicle sizes. It's the same reason a small city airport might have one or two regional jets per day serving it instead of 2 747s per week.

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"Centralize transit on major corridors" is about full buses. But transit agencies spend as much per hour on an empty bus as a full one. Transit agencies run empty buses on routes that are rarely full, and run vans and even microtransit that may just be a waste of money.