The waiting time paradox: why is my bus always late? (2018)

Robotic buses could be made smaller than driver buses since the cost of driver doesn't need to be amortized as many passengers as possible. Then you could implement optional stop skipping. At the end of the spectrum you have Uber X ie taxi with ride sharing.

Buses already do this.

If nobody is waiting and nobody asks to get off they don’t stop. If nobody asks to get off and there’s a second bus right behind, drivers skip the stop.

It amuses me how many people don't know how busses work on that front. I'm assuming most people have more of a train mentality when it comes to this?

I'd guess most people here don't actually take buses on a regular basis. (Or ever. Or any public transit at all.)

Let's take this to it's logical conclusion, where each individual rider is given their own packetized vehicle that takes them right to their destination. We can amortize this cost by relying on the riders themselves as the drivers.

Yes of course. But it's not so useful since the buses are so big and they arrive so infrequently. With robobuses you could have smaller more frequent arrivals and then have higher probability of skipping. If the robobus understands the bus stop person's gestures that are they trying to stop it or not...

What's the cost of the driver vs fuel/maintenance/capital cost of bus?

Respectfully, this is a trick question. The driver isn't exclusively there to drive, they help tourists that ask "Can I get to X, or do I need another bus?". They help wheelchair users, they know to wait extra time when cyclists need to collect their bikes from the front bus rack. They know when to pull poles (and reattach them) on trolley buses in Vancouver (where I hail from). They report fare-dodgers, they radio control saying their bus is too full to pick up anyone waiting at the stop, and most importantly: they write down what goes wrong during their day, so maintenance knows what to fix when the bus is at the garage.

Seriously, Translink runs on a 28-hour day for bus service. If you want someone to test every single system, especially someone that knows how a system should work vs how it does work vs how it failed on this particular bus, you already have an employee for the job; one that's doing customer service and working around any shortcomings at the same time.

I would not count on bus drivers being replaced by AI any time soon.

I've seen a study done not that long ago for a small to medium sized German city. The idea was either taking the existing bus service and expanding it to a 10-minute-frequency all-day on all routes, or else keeping only the three most important (regional) bus routes and replacing everything else with a massive fleet of on-demand vehicles.

The surprising results:

- According to the results of the traffic modelling, the on-demand scenario wasn't substantially more successful in attracting additional passengers than the "classic buses running every 10 minutes" scenario (i.e. in both cases predicted passenger counts increased, but by approximately the same amount). This was because on-demand public transport has quite a bit of time-wise overhead, too: You need to order a vehicle instead of simply showing up at the bus stop, it takes a while for the next vehicle to arrive, due to ride sharing some detours might be incurred compared to a direct route, and the unpredictable journey time variation due to these factors is very disadvantageous when connecting to fixed-route fixed-timetable public transport, such as the remaining three bus routes, or railway services.

- The overhead of operating a large fleet of on-demand vehicles was high enough that even with driverless operation the on-demand scenario was more expensive to operate than the expanded every-ten-minutes bus service with drivers

The cost of a human operator is not even remotely close to as important a factor as you think it is.

SF recently acquired 33 new buses for $1.7 million apiece. Throw in maintenance and fuel costs and it’s easy to see that amortizing over a driver making $40/hr plus benefits is just not that big a deal, especially if you’re now adding a suite of sensors, electronics, and computing hardware.