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Each individual improvement was usually small and insignificant.
NYC only has 6k buses for 2 million weekday passengers. Make them more convenient by say having 20k of them and you get more traffic throughput.
Classic school bus costs ~10k/year in depreciation and get 10 miles to the gallon making the driver at an average 18$/hour the largest cost even outside of cities.
The majority of bus drivers are semi-retired folk looking for something to keep them active and earn a bit on the side.
I'm speaking from experience.
I would guess a driver costs $60-90k year including taxes and benefits.
Drivers aren't a majority of the cost of operating a bus, but I'd bet it's at least 20%.
Fuel is also cheap as they are only averaging 7MPH even at 2-4MPG it’s just not touching 27+$/hour for the drivers.
Per utilized seat, handmade diesel busses are way more expensive to buy and operate than commodity vehicles like Jaguar iPace or the Zeekr Mix.
Further you need HR and managers to handle having a large driver workforce. So while drivers aren’t responsible for all of that 70%, they are a high percentage of it.
By moving from specialty vehicles like large diesel busses to vehicles based on commodity/consumer minivans, it will be possible to multiple external services. This gives the taxpayer the benefit of scale and competition.
There's no need for a monopoly in city transit. In a future state, we could have multiple transit providers, similar to how airlines operate today.
Adding buses to already congested streets might just make the situation worse.
Israel ran into this problem, and they are desperately trying to recover by building light rail in big cities.
That seems counterintuitive, but bus utilization and congestion occur at the same time. So one bus is replacing 20-60 cars in busy periods. At 2AM an empty bus may be taking up a lot of road, but the streets are practically empty.
It might depend on many things, like whether the bus actually goes anywhere useful, or the would-be passengers would still have to travel far from their stop (and would prefer to drive a car, as bus doesn't solve their commute problem). Would be especially problematic in areas with single-family houses spaced far apart. Very infrequent bus service may also be a factor that would sway would-be passengers to drive cars instead, but it would be hard to justify more buses on the line.
Well, I'm not a city planner, just trying to imagine the potential problems. Bet people who deal with this would know better.
A bus on the usual fixed routes? Not really.
The healthier option for the masses is expanding mass transit networks, not luxe taxis. Light rail is infinitely more efficient and safer than individual vehicles, be they owner-operated or self-driving. It moves more people, further, faster, and cheaper than any potential self-driving automobile. When you include the whole of networks - ferries, bus routes, commuter rail - they’re the single most effective solution to everything self-driving car proponents claim their products can do, if only they had another round of funding.
I’m not saying we should stop investing in the technology, mind. I just think it’s a better use of our limited resources to invest in improving, expanding, and modernizing mass transit than to build armies of privately-owned taxis, self-driving or otherwise.
Not by themselves. But combine them with a congestion tax, unless the taxi is full, and you've got an infinitely adaptable, cheap, and scalable bus network.
I like public transit, and I Know he public can get a lot more for its money if we leave behind our old thinking.