Better bus coverage and reliability would be ideal but perhaps this could be used to help make the case in the mean time.
Of course this also requires proper bicycle infrastructure to be available, but it shows how well this could work.
https://www.ns.nl/klantenservice/deur-tot-deur-diensten/ov-f...
>Kan ik een OV-fiets op een andere locatie inleveren?
>Je kunt een OV-fiets ook op een andere locatie inleveren. Je betaalt dan wel € 10 extra. Deze extra kosten zijn voor het verplaatsen van de fiets.
>Lever je de fiets in bij een andere locatie op hetzelfde station? Dan betaal je niks extra.
The main restriction is that you should bring it back to the place where you rented it, or pay €10 extra. I don't know how they'd even know that you took it out of the city?
But with those two restrictions you would still serve a very significant chunk of the population of pretty much any country. It's really the bike infrastructure that's the limiting factor elsewhere.
Busses seem suboptimal if you don’t need a driver. They’re too big.
Peoples’ travel plans in space and time are naturally heterogenous; the less we force passengers to travel to and from stops or change their plans to match a schedule, the more people will ride.
If you've ever taken a cruise you've seen this work beautifully. Even with multiple excursions, busses are optimal for getting people around because the 100s of people on the ship are ultimately going to the same places.
Cruises are one of the rare cases where our buses are correctly sized and competitive against rail, in large part because you’l continuing the social experience of being on a cruise ship.
When you consider what makes a bus-sized bus perfect for tour groups and the like, it quickly becomes apparent why they’re not optimally sized for transit outside the constraints imposed by driver economics.
Drivers are the dominant operating cost of a bus system, and they’re typically paid regardless of ridership. That means you have a minimum ridership per driver required to offset their cost.
Bus systems thus size the bus and route to ensure that minimum ridership. That, in turn, requires aggregating demand, i.e. forcing people to change the places and times of their transit to line up with the bus’s. Analogous to lift and drag, the more you force people to change their schedules, the more you lose potential demand to alternatives.
If you don’t have a driver, you can make your transports as big or small as you’d like. In rare cases, they’ll be bus sized. But most busses either aren’t consistently full or lose a lot of potential riders because their schedules and stops are inconvenient. A fleet of smaller vehicles sops up that demand without hauling around a bunch of dead mass off rush hour.
Transit systems are usually sized for peak demand. Because you are paying for the vehicles and the infrastructure anyway, the marginal cost of offering better service outside peak hours is low. Especially if the drivers receive monthly wages and have semi-reasonable shifts. And that means buses are far from being full most of the time.
Right. Now remove drivers from the equation.
The ideal size for a bus goes down because you can effectively turn off parts of the bus outside peak hours. (By parking some of the fleet.) Moreover, you can induce new demand by adding (and moving) virtual stops wherever your customers are. Busses via rideshare doesn’t work with a driver; it does if you can spin up and down your fleet on a dime.
No, it doesn't, because if you have lots of small buses then high-traffic areas will get clogged with lots of little buses loading and unloading and just physically taking up space in bus lanes. If anything, you generally want _bigger_ buses; most large cities size buses as big as the road infra will take (with the exception that a lot of cities won't consider double-deckers even where they'd make sense, due to lack of familiarity). Now, some of that is drivers, but some of it is just capacity.
(Or sometimes slightly bigger than the road infrastructure will take. About once a decade, Dublin Bus tries articulated buses, which then get stuck on roundabouts, reminding Dublin Bus why it doesn't have articulated buses.)
The mass difference between a big bus and a small bus also isn't generally _that_ huge. A smallish single-decker is about 10 tonnes, these days a big double-decker is only about 12.
Ideal bus size may go down if peak demand also decreases. For example, if working from home becomes more common. Smaller buses may also become more viable when direct bus lines are replaced with rail lines and feeder buses.
Where are you getting this? I know of no transit system which would add more buses were there just less congestion…
Most city streets are intended only for local traffic, and it's often inconvenient to use local streets for longer trips. Which means buses usually drive on major streets, which may become congested during peak hours. Due to fixed overheads, large buses use less road space per passenger and less stop time per passenger getting on/off.
It's also common that there is not enough space for a bus to pass a stopped bus due to congestion. Which means buses may have to stop at every stop on the route, even if no passenger is getting on/off.
Non sequitur.
You said busses are constrained by congestion. That's simply not true. When congestion is reduced, due to demographics or a congestion charge, cities don't run out to buy more busses. If the release of a suspected constraint doesn't cause an increase in signal, it isn't a constraint.
The real constraints on buses are demand, capital budgets and operating budgets. The dominant component of the last is the driver. The dominating deterimant of the first is the route. If you can have more buses on more routes for the same capital and operating cost as fewer, big buses, you'll increae ridership.
The problem is, you probably only have a limited number of suitable arteries, so those routes are going to have places where they overlap. There are bus stops near me which at peak times have multiple buses per minute arriving, on many different routes, and at peak times these sometimes pile up and have to wait to load and unload. That's with big hundred-person double-deckers; it would be far worse if they were smaller.
frequent buses are good because you shouldn't have to wait when you are ready to go. Fixed routes again mean you can plan on it.
You'd still have buses travel routes with fixed points they aim to be at on time. They just have more freedom between those points to deviate. Again, if you have one big bus this doesn't work. If you have lots of smaller ones, it does because not everyone on board will need to stop at every scheduled stop. (And if they do, you punt the detour to the next bus. Or better yet, spin up a new one from the garage. Mechanics you can't do with a fixed set of scheduled drivers.)
Consistently one of the most sold-out and profitable routes.
These used to be quite a big deal, but in practice most such services have died out.
There also used to be _car planes_: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Traders_Carvair
Every commuter rail line really should do this. Obviously Caltrain could not do this for every train, but how about some trains?
[1] https://cdn.acerail.com/wp-content/uploads/ACE-Shuttle-Map-S...