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Comment by Schiendelman | Hacker News Reader

The cost of providing a bus exceeds the cost of operating a car in many cases, like lower population density neighborhoods. It may save the public money to centralize transit on major corridors and then subsidize trips on Waymo in some areas and at some times.

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how many people can fit in a bus compared to a car?

Doesn't matter if there's only four people willing to ride on a given schedule.

That is an argument for buses on well-designed routes and schedules, not an argument against buses.

It is like saying “that bus would be useless at the bottom of a lake”

well, yeah. The first step would be not driving it into a lake

It depends on the population density. You may have a perfectly well designed route for the area, but there are only so many people per hour that want to take a trip. You can delete routes and make people walk further, but that makes the trip take longer and not everyone can or wants to walk a long ways to the bus stop.

Different population densities have different optimal vehicle sizes. It's the same reason a small city airport might have one or two regional jets per day serving it instead of 2 747s per week.

Yep, you definitely want a range of bus sizes. Some areas are served perfectly well with a couple of these

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Minotour

Still other are better served with these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_KR200

https://railvelocipedes.org/ 8-)

"Centralize transit on major corridors" is about full buses. But transit agencies spend as much per hour on an empty bus as a full one. Transit agencies run empty buses on routes that are rarely full, and run vans and even microtransit that may just be a waste of money.

The OP you're responding suggested using Waymo's to help fill the buses, not get rid of buses.

I suggested both. Milk runs through suburban neighborhoods likely make sense to get rid of entirely.

Which are almost always fairly empty so the critic's comments about bus capacity is irrelevant.

> cost of providing a bus exceeds the cost of operating a car in many cases

You can fit 40-50 people in your car?

This only works if the bus is popular. How often do buses in Portland have more than 5 people on them?

How often do cars have more than 5 people in them?

Per [1], a typical Portland public bus causes about 730 times more road wear than a full size pickup truck (which is about the worst case for road wear from a personal vehicle). How many buses have more than 700 people riding in them?

(I am of course ignoring the scaling for fuel, maintenance, pollution, and traffic costs of personal vehicles; but my point is that most people severely underestimate just how awful the economic case for an underused full size bus is. Now, minibuses and microbuses are a different story; but US public transit systems don't use them.)

[1] https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...

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