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

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