Me: I would ride the bus if it was available more than once every 30 minutes. At this point it's faster for me to Uber.
City councilmember: why should we allocate even more funds to the busses? Nobody's riding them!
City councilmember: why should we allocate even more funds to the busses? Nobody's riding them!
The thing is that where I live, the bus network is heavily funded and I'm suspecting that it's probably operating already with too little efficiency most of the day and most lines - basically a lot of buses driving around nearly empty at times.
Since I bike in the city, I can't fail to notice that buses also seems to generate most of the dust, if not all of it - sometimes you basically have to stop and wait a few minutes if you are biking behind a bus, since it's not possible to neither see or breathe. Even on an at least nominally clean tarmac road. I haven't noticed that behind a Nissan Micra.
Further, large diesel engines running heavy start-stop duty cycles like buses probably generates unproportionally more particles than just about everything else.
Since this city have one of the highest count of both PM10 and PM2.5 - source could be either oil or dust - this also have got me thinking.
Where I live, the focus on buses is driven by a political agenda - basically the environmentalists and the left have defined buses as "good" and cars as "bad" - and I suspect regardless of any facts in the matter, exemplified in an interview where one politician admitted that they'd really love to ban cars even if the had no environmental impact at all.
I'm not particularly fighting for more cars and less buses, but I like my facts straight before implementing public policy. I haven't been able to find any official published statistics in fuel consumption per passenger mile for the public transport in the region - should be somewhat trivial to calculate now that every passenger conveniently carries a tracking device with them.
I also haven't been able to find any studies about particle emissions for buses and if it's possible to find any correlation between the ratio of buses to other traffic and particulates.
Unfortunatly, I suspect that research on topics like those is probably heretical and a thought crime in most Universities' departments for environmental studies.
Still, electric buses on the larger streets instead of vaparettos on the Grand Canal is a lovely thought.
The good news: electric busses are coming. City busses will be huge winners from electrification, both for economic and environmental reasons. Greatly reduced fuel and maintenance costs, improved ride quality, less noise and pollution.
It is also the fact that they are grossly inefficient space-wise. The majority have only the driver (and maybe, maybe a single passenger) in an otherwise empty car. Congestion would be vastly reduced if we could get most of those people on public transport or bikes instead.
Combined with the fact that the roads are heavily sanded and salted half of the year, and that they are swept rather than washed, for some reason often only once in the year, the roads are dirty.
I know that other cities wash the streets more or less constantly, but here they claim it won't help which seems questionable to me.
Winter tyres with studs are allowed here (in the winter) and are getting a lot of attention since they generate a lot of particles in laboratory tests - but it would be interesting to see what 3 months of grinding sand and salt in snow slush with heavy weight wheels will generate, with or without studs.
But yes : electric busses would be nice. With a soft driving filter applied...
At this point Venice is basically an open air museum for tourists. It can hardly serve as an example for regular cities that house people who live and work there.
That's a bit of a strawman argument, but nevertheless there are strong and indisputable benefits to public transport over cars.
One is the pollution. Per passenger, even diesel buses pollute a lot less than cars, and electric buses are being phased in. There are also some buses that run on cleaner-burning natural gas, but those are more of a stopgap measure.
Secondly, congestion is markedly reduced by getting more people on public transport and bikes. People simply take up less space when they're not driving around a mostly empty car.
Regarding the dust, it's not really produced by the buses, but it does get whirled up more by large vehicles. The dust is produced by everything; cars, buses, trucks, bikes, even pedestrians to some extent. Reducing one of those sources, by for instance getting thousands of people to take the bus instead of driving their cars alone, will significantly reduce particle pollution.
>"Unfortunatly, I suspect that research on topics like those is probably heretical and a thought crime in most Universities' departments for environmental studies."
That's nonsense. My girlfriend studies at our national technical university and there is plenty research being done on all environmental factors.
And I'm not questioning reduced pollution in fully laden busses or reducing congestion in crowded routes in the rush hour, but I haven't seen anything about total system effects in "saturated" systems where the total seat factor is low, and where additional "conversion" will require more buses that will run emptier.
Although that seems to only consider diesel-powered buses. CNG or electric buses are better.