I love buses as a transit option. They go directly to parking lots of places like grocery stores and ride smoother than a lot of trains/subways/etc I've been on. If the routes are useful then people will use them and they're as simple to scale as buying more buses and very easy to dynamically adjust, unlike train lines.
It's turned out to be very politically difficult to establish and (just as importantly) enforce bus lanes in communities in the US. People get very upset at the prospect of giving up either street parking or travel lanes, and local politicians and the traffic enforcement bureaucracy has mostly sided with the people who complain. The result is either no bus lanes, or part-time bus lanes with no effective enforcement, which is basically the same as no bus lanes.
A bus that's able to use bus lanes (and possibly transit signal priority) to bypass traffic is a great thing, and would be appealing to people across the socioeconomic spectrum. A bus that's stuck in the same traffic as the cars has no benefit other than cost, and will only appeal to those who can't afford to maintain a car or are very ideologically committed to transit.
Buses would be amazing with bus lanes in congested areas and automated camera-based enforcement of those lanes. However, the inability of the political system to make that happen even in Manhattan makes me fairly pessimistic for that outcome in other places.
I still think it's worth investing in buses for those who need them, but if they can't bypass traffic they will be stuck at a low mode share almost everywhere.
If you want to make buses actually work, make them work like Uber. You go to the bus stop where there is a screen you can input your destination (or you use your phone), and the nearest minibus going in your direction stops to pick you up, which each carries eight passengers rather than forty. Then it drops you off at your actual destination instead of four blocks from there, and picks you up faster to begin with because there are five times as many buses of a fifth the size and they can be diverted from nearby routes to pick you up as soon as you summon them.
At that point they're almost as good as a car most of the time, only they cost a lot less and only take up an eighth of the space on the road per passenger. And you don't have to operate huge wasteful 40-passenger vehicles during off-peak hours just to carry 3 passengers.
Uber-style minibuses don't work because the human bus driver is expensive. Once you're already paying for a driver, it makes sense to make the bus full-size so that you can maximize the number of riders per bus.
Except for all the ones who don't, because one of the endpoints isn't anywhere near the bus route even if part of the path between them goes along it.
> Uber-style minibuses don't work because the human bus driver is expensive.
Apparently they do, as demonstrated by all the people who use Uber in preference to buses.
> Once you're already paying for a driver, it makes sense to make the bus full-size so that you can maximize the number of riders per bus.
Unless that requires you to have less frequent service that covers fewer areas, which in turn causes people to choose single passenger cars over your buses.
You can also eliminate the driver cost by doing what Uber was originally billed as -- ride sharing. You're going to drive your car from your home to your workplace and back, but if you get up fifteen minutes earlier you can make a few bucks by picking up some of your neighbors and dropping them off at work. That's a lot less than the cost of a full-time bus driver with benefits but at scale it still results in a fraction of the number of cars on the road during rush hour.
I think at least in some places in the US, this is a class thing, though few people will admit it. Buses are associated with lower-class people, whereas rail (especially heavy rail) is associated with middle class people.
You often hear that we spend much more on roads than rail, which is true, but we drive much much more than we take the train. For example, the D.C. metro receives about a $0.42 per passenger mile subsidy: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/not-a-dime-more-for-.... Meanwhile, state and local governments spend $155 billion on roads, about half of which is paid for by usage fees (tolls and gas tax). Given the 3 trillion miles driven on roads every year, that works out to just $0.024 per passenger mile of subsidy: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/pressroom/fhwa1704.cfm.
The cleaning lady who drives 10 miles to work costs the government $0.24 for each trip. When a white collar worker takes Metro 10 miles to work,[1] it costs the government $4.20.
[1] The median Metro rider has a household income of over $100,000 and 80% have a college degree. That's because the people who take Metro can afford to buy expensive housing near a Metro station, and go to white collar jobs downtown. The cleaning lady, and other lower income workers, can't afford to live near a Metro station, and many work the 90% of jobs in the metro area that aren't downtown.
There are transit districts which run entirely different coaches on commute vs. urban or general transit routes. Commute have comfortable seats, overhead briefcase stowage, reading lights, and. often wifi. Urban transit: hard seats, no amenities, often standing-room only.
Now, high quality bus services with dedicated lanes can be pretty decent but most bus services aren't like that.
Of course some cities have BRT routes, dedicated lanes, and high service frequency. If you have access to a bus network like that, indeed it can operate as well or better than a rail system (and often at a lower cost). But that is the exception in the US, not the norm. Whereas most commuter and urban rail in the US operates with high frequency and dedicated right-of-way. Hence the presumption that buses "don't count".
Don't shoot the messenger.
There is a vicious cycle of under-investment (fulfilling transit goals with half-assed bus routes instead of making real investments in lightrail/subway) poor service, and resulting lack of utilization among middle class voters ... which leads to further under-investment (since none of us are going to take the bus) ...
I am not talking about SF or NYC. I am talking about every other city in the US that matches this description perfectly.