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Comment by raxxorraxor | Hacker News Reader

We had electric busses in our city. They were awesome. The were far less noisy and didn't stink. But they were scrapped again. Reason: Diesel busses had a maintenance time of 2%, electric busses of 5%, meaning they spend 5% of their running time in maintenance. That was all, so we now have loud and stinky busses again.

That said, I don't think you can ever replace individual traffic. It is only possible in the most dense cities. Otherwise bus travel is too slow and unreliable for people working 40h+.

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Which city is that?

    bus travel is too slow

I would expect travel to speed up when we move from cars to buses. Look at what cars do most of the time. Waiting at crossings, slowing down for crossings, accelerating after passing a crossing. I have not measured it yet, but I would expect buses that carry 20 passengers each to accelerate that by a factor of 10 or so.

    and unreliable

You mean when the bus is stuck in traffic? Don't you have the same problem with a car?

    people working 40h+

I would think people who work 40h would be happy if they could do their work in a nice electric bus with a table instead of spending that time handling a steering wheel.

> but I would expect buses that carry 20 passengers each

FWIW, that's a _tiny_ bus. Typical city buses take 80-100 people, articulated buses about 150. At peak time on important routes they'll generally be mostly full.

The major capacity limit on buses is stopping. On busy systems at peak times, you'll tend to get clumping at stops, as similar routes line up one after another.

    city buses take 80-100 people, articulated buses about 150

Yes, but then they are not offering a ride that is better than a ride in a private car.

I have took an extensive look at this over the last weeks. A typical articulated bus can only carry about 20 to 30 passengers who are seated as comfortably as in a private car.

Partly that is because of the design of the buses. If the buses were redesigned to comfortably seat people, they could probably carry an additional 10 or 20 passengers who are comfortably seated.

> Yes, but then they are not offering a ride that is better than a ride in a private car.

Oh, I missed that point. I mean, personally I'd say that any bus offers a better ride than driving a car, in that you do not have to _drive_ the thing, but tastes differ, of course.

Ideally most urban bus routes would be short enough that healthy people can comfortably use them without sitting.

Realistically, the costs of operating a bus are pretty fixed, and bus networks have hard space-based caps on capacity (as I mention elsewhere stops in particular are a problem), so the priority will always be on getting as many people in the space as possible. It's hard to see why any public transport authority would do seating-only urban buses; it would degrade the system as a whole, and the ticket price would be unreasonably high.

Most people, also, will care more about "can I actually get on the bus for my 20 minute journey" than "if I get on, will I have a comfy seat", which tends to indicate a mostly-standing design with seating available for elderly and disabled people.

As an example, take my local system. Dublin's main bus system has about 1,300 buses in operation; almost all of these are double-deckers with a capacity of 90-100 people. The system is pretty much limited by availability of drivers. Fares are 2 euro for a 90 minute journey (or where the last leg of the journey is started within 90 minutes of the first one). Adopting your system, we'd need five times as many buses, so for a start we'd need 6,500 buses, along with maybe 15,000 drivers and another 5,000 or so support staff. It's hard to see how that could happen without dramatically increasing the cost. But also, at peak times, major bus corridors are full of buses, and major bus stops have buses queueing up. It would simply not be reasonable to 5x this.

    why any public transport authority would do seating-only urban buses

To get people to use the bus instead of a car.

The average car costs €300/month. Plus about the same amount of opportunity costs, missed by having to control the steering wheel for about an hour per day.

A public transport flatrate in Germany is only €59.

Seems like there is a huge gap in the middle for a better bus experience.

It would not degrade the system but wastly improve it. Because the buses would be additional buses. Each bus taking over 100 cars of the road. A bus can carry over 20 passengers and drive over 10 hours per day. While the average car ride carries 1.1 passengers or so and the car is only used 1 hour per day or so.

Okay, so you're talking about an additional premium/first class bus service, rather than a change to the existing service? I suspect that that is doomed, because class-segregated intraurban transport _used to be a thing_ (albeit largely on metro and commuter train services, not buses), and it's died out virtually everywhere in the world; when offered the choice of paying X or 3X for the same journey with better seating, people just don't want to do that for short journeys.

For instance the Paris Metro system used to have a first class carriage, until I think the late 80s.

And this would actually be worse, because you'd be talking about separate, likely less frequent buses. Most people will just get on the first thing that comes along, unless it's more expensive.

In general, on transport, people will pay a premium for speed; _express_ bus routes can charge a premium. For instance going to the airport I can take the city bus system for 2 euro and take over an hour (I'm on the wrong side of the city) or an express service that takes 20 minutes but costs 8 euro. I take the express one, and so do enough other people that it stays in business. And they'll pay for better seating for _long_ journeys. But 'long' appears to mean "at least an hour" and possibly "at least two hours".

(Semi-anecdotal evidence of this; in Ireland, a small country where most rail journeys not involving a transfer are <2 hours, first class _used_ to be a thing on trains, but it has been withdrawn from all services except Dublin-Belfast (2 hours) and Dublin-Cork (2.5 hours) because people simply weren't using it. You also see this with air travel; non-budget airlines have been cutting non-economy seating on short routes for years because it's hard to sell.)

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.

> 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.

> Most people, also, will care more about "can I actually get on the bus for my 20 minute journey" than "if I get on, will I have a comfy seat", which tends to indicate a mostly-standing design with seating available for elderly and disabled people.

For me, knowing that the bus/tram is probably going to be packed and I won't be able to find a seat is a very good reason to try and find a different route/mode of transport, especially if I'm carrying something. I know that some people don't mind, but I really do, even though I'm young and reasonably fit. I'd rather sit down for 35 minutes than stand up for 20.

They were doing something wrong. In many European cities I have lived and visited, electric buses are all over the place.

> Otherwise bus travel is too slow and unreliable for people working 40h+

This feels like a very US mindset.

In many other places buses are very reliable and cities are built around them e.g. dedicated bus lanes and so they are often much faster than driving.

Given a bunch of us live in the US a US mindset shouldn't be shocking. Whereas in other places other ground truths apply, in the US exactly zero major metropolitan areas are built around mass transit making it wildly impractical for the bulk of human traffic.

Half of the metro areas in the US used to have comprehensive public transit! Do you think Americans just didn't live in cities before cars?

So many americans are seemingly utterly ignorant of their own history and then use that ignorance to insist "It can't happen here"

Go read up on the tram systems we used to have.

> Half of the metro areas in the US used to have comprehensive public transit!

Sure, when said metro areas were a 10th of their current size with a couple orders of magnitude fewer residents street cars were kind of a thing. You cannot credibly expect a similar system to service the suburban sprawl around Atlanta for example. So unless the plan is to dragline the suburbs and mulch 80% of the urban population this is a complete non-starter. The sheer number of routes and volume of equipment required to service them would be financially prohibitive.

Buses are fantastic for the use case "we need to transport 100 people from suburbs to the office every day at 8AM", but they completely suck at use case "this one guy wants to come back home from a concert at 2AM". This means you need some personal vehicle anyway. And if you already have a car, why not use it for work commute.

Living in a bike-oriented city, I think e-bikes are the future. Almost as versatile as cars, with none of the downsides.

"why not use it for work-commute"

In Oslo (and I am sure other European places), the answer is simply "because I want to spend 30 minutes on my commute instead of 90 minutes". (At least for train/metro)

Assuming urban areas: Roads are always congested. Building more roads/more lanes only relieves it a few years then car traffic increases until you are as congested as before. (You can find proper scientific studies of this effect -- "induced traffic")

But public transport, if enough people take it, take so ridiculously many more passengers per area of road that it cuts through this effect and actually helps congestion. (Establishing a bus route may also induce more traffic, but you can add another bus much more cheaply than another road lane, and actually keep up.)

This requires buses to be prioritized in traffic though (dedicated lanes), otherwise there is as you point out no reason for individuals to take public transport.

Basically a reserved bus/metro lane gives you "infinite road capacity" (with the obvious caveats)

> At least for train/metro

This is why real estate close to metro is significantly more expensive than further away from metro.

> Basically a reserved bus/metro lane

Yes

Buses and subways can operate during the night as well. Never had this issue.

> Never had this issue.

Username checks out

> this one guy wants to come back home from a concert at 2AM

Night buses are a thing. A city / urban area large enough to have concerts at 2AM should be able to support a set of them running one or two per hour with a 15 minutes’ walk to the closest stop. (There’s a tradeoff between convenience and empty buses, and night buses are there more to make sure nobody gets stuck.)

> A city / urban area large enough to have concerts at 2AM should be able to support a set of them running one or two per hour with a 15 minutes’ walk to the closest stop

> should

But it doesn't.

I mean... every city I've been in in the last few years has either 24 hour routes or night routes or both. (I do think it used to be less common, but at least in Western Europe it is now standard for largish cities.)

> but they completely suck at use case "this one guy wants to come back home from a concert at 2AM".

Hmm, last week I was out til about 4am on Friday night, then got a 24 hour bus home. That's what I generally do when I'm out late.

> This means you need some personal vehicle anyway

Unless you're not drinking at this 2am concert, you're probably not using a personal car.

Buses are actually quite _good_ for this use case, in that they're much cheaper to run 24/7 than trams and heavy rail (whose higher capacity is largely useless late at night, and, particularly in the case of heavy rail, really _need_ maintenance downtime).

bicycles don't work when the user is sufficiently drunk, as one might be, when leaving a concert at 2am or later. it's not a competition, the beauty of living in a city full of people is having a half dozen ways to get where you are going, instead of being limited to one or two.

Does the maintenance time include regular servicing or is it only the time spent out of service in a day, for example charging?

I think electric vehicles are such a clear win for pollution (air and sound pollution) in cities that rolling back to ICEs should be clearly justified.

How can electric buses have more maintenance downtime than diesel?

Here in the Netherlands the bus companies are required to buy by tender which has led to the purchase of lots of cheap Byd busses. While they are fast enough and silent they are not that great: there are software problems, heaters don't work, doors won't close and the seats are so bad the (already scarce) drivers are getting back problems.

As a general rule, in transport fleets, unless the old thing is actually basically at the point where it needs to be scrapped right now, the new thing always has more downtime than the old thing, because the old thing has had its kinks ironed out, and the maintainers are used to maintaining it.

Of course, the trouble is, sometimes the new thing is just bad. A commuter/metro train system in my city operates mostly on 40 year old rolling stock. In 2000, some new trainsets were introduced, from two different manufacturers. One model never really worked properly, and was scrapped in 2008; the other survived. The whole thing is now due to be replaced with shiny new trains, starting this year... hopefully these ones work.

You're talking about Dublin, right?

Yup (the scrapped Alstom DARTs). But it happens everywhere; for a start we weren't the only users of that problematic Alstom model. You see a lot of old train rolling stock around, but there's a hell of a survivorship bias; a really alarming number of train models last less than a decade in service in any given operator.

You'd _think_ this wouldn't happen, because reliability is absolutely the number one thing that operators care about, and they're usually willing to pay a premium to get it (the alternative being to pay to keep their reliable 40 year old units in service). But the industry's surprisingly bad at delivering it.

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