Public Transportation: Rubber tires vs. Steel Wheels

[Ban my account ffs!]

One of the biggest debates about public transportation revolves around buses vs. rail.

Pros for buses:

Cheaper up front.  They don't require the expensive capital investments in laying rails.  Bus stops can be built relatively cheaply.

Flexibility:  Buses are flexible.  If it turns out a route has 50% more passengers than expected, more buses can easily be added to the route... especially if another route is under used.

Cons for buses:

Loud/Noisy/Smelly:  Riding a bus is never as pleasant as riding a train.  They jostle around, they're loud.  They have smelly exhaust.  In short, they're a way to get from point A to point B... but that's about it.

Flexibility:  A big part of transit development is the potential for development and densification along the routes.  Businesses are more reluctant to invest along a bus route because bus routes can easily be moved in the future.  There is a certain "foreverness" component to plunking down rails.

Labor costs:  Buses hold fewer passengers per unit, and unlike trains, which can be driverless, each bus has to be operated by an experienced driver who can deal with the unforeseen "surprises" that crop up operating among regular traffic.


With that said, new technologies that make buses quieter, less smelly, and smoother have greatly improved the bus riding experience.  And dedicated lanes (like carpool lanes) along relatively fixed routes in Bus Rapid Transit can be very successful... especially if there is investment to make it much like a rail line... but on rubber tires.

In any case... buses are going to remain an integral part of any transit system.  How do you think they could be improved?

What would make them more desirable for middle class commuters?

And last, but not least, how do we adapt bus and rail networks to account for the greatly increased suburb-to-suburb commuting that takes place nowadays when nearly all transit systems focus on getting people from the suburbs to downtown?

[Ban my account ffs!]

Buses present two challenges for suburban commuters. You've touched on the perception differences that cause resistance to bus rides compared to trains. The bigger problem is that both residences and jobs tend to be at too low of a density to support public transit for enough years to build a real sense of ridership. BRT has the possibility to do that, but suburban circulator service with app-based on-demand service may work better.

Suburbs are also ripe for transit oriented development which would benefit from more "permanent" lines like Bus Rapid Transit.  Also, with infill and denser projects having become more popular in recent years it wouldn't be a bad idea to get the buses on the ground now even they are being subsidized.

Obviously what suburbanites want to see is congestion relief... not sitting in stop-and-go traffic on the freeway while they watch fancy buses with nobody on them go racing by.

This idea that we need to force people into transit by purposely making driving difficult and inconvenient is wrong.

Roads/freeways and transitways should be developed simultaneously... and yes.. technology should be used to maximize ridership.

You can run suburban bus service pretty cheaply even if it is still subsidized because it basically just works as a feeder to the potentially profitable central lines.  (That's how transit agencies did things before WWII)

The thing is:  People nowadays demand that every line be profitable.  That's simply not possible.  Some will always be money hogs... but they will be the feeder routes for the bigger, more productive lines.