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Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

Segregation is not neccessary to have more seats.

If we double the number of buses, we can increase the number of seats per bus and still have a higher overall passenger capacity in the city.

In my city, I see buses that have only seated places all the time:

https://www.moia.io

It is an interesting mix of a private and public service. Mostly it is used by people who prefer a better ride experience than on a public bus. And are fine with paying a much higher price per ride. They pay out of their own pocket to the service provider, Volkswagen. But for people with disabilities, using the Moia buses is free and paid by the city.

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> If we double the number of buses, we can increase the number of seats per bus and still have a higher overall passenger capacity in the city.

As mentioned, in a large bus system, the logistical challenges of doubling the number of buses would be formidable, and would likely lead to overall service degradation.

> https://www.moia.io

Are people paying for the _seats_, here, though, or for the more direct route? (AIUI it's a hybrid bus-taxi sort of thing where it only stops where people have indicated they want to be dropped off/picked up on an app). Like, if it was all-seats but operated on a normal bus route, I doubt people would pay for it.

I'd also question how sustainable it is; as far as I can see it's basically an experiment by VW, and likely a subsidised one. It feels like one of these things being prepped in case self-driving vehicles ever work properly. And in any case the scale is _tiny_; apparently a ridership of 11 million ever.

So you expect the number of buses in the metropolises of the world to stagnate?

I think that there's a practical upper limit for most cities (it'll vary somewhat depending on population, road layout, openness to measures like making significant parts of the road network bus only, etc), and that most cities do tend towards more or less hitting it, yeah. Adding bus capacity is a cheap option up to a point, but there are _limits_, and as you hit those limits you generally explore expensive higher capacity options for busy routes (in rough order of expensiveness and capacity these tend to go BRT -> tram -> commuter rail -> metro).

This is a simplification, and there's definitely wiggle room within those categories (for instance, there exist tram lines which are higher capacity than many metro lines, mostly through the use of extremely long tramsets) but _basically_ how it works; buses can only take you so far, capacity-wise.

Why would there be an uppper limit for the number of buses?

I would think that as long as there are cars on the road, each new bus is a net positive, as it replaces 100 cars.

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