US cities pay too much for buses

Don't be fooled, paying less won't help much since the cost of a bus is a small part of the costs of running a bus route. about half your costs are the bus driver. The most expensive bus is still only 1/3rd of your hourly cost of running the bus. If a more expensive bus is more reliable that could more than make up for a more expensive bus (I don't have any numbers to do math on though).

Half the costs of running a bus route are the driver's labor. The other half needs to pay for maintenance, the cost of the bus, and all the other overhead.

I'm hearing you say we should have self-driving buses... which is feasible since their route is fixed.

Bus driver also does things like trigger ramp for handicapped people, strap in wheelchairs securely, answer questions about the route, and security surveillance.

Probably true, but those are accounted for differently, and (I'd speculate) that public transit labor costs convert tax dollars into economic activity as efficiently as the route can possibly operate given the constraints on the rest of the system. The lower the overhead to buying busses and the more reliably you can run them, along with making them more usable by your regional population, the more efficiently you're moving people to their jobs and the more of the tax dollars allocated to transit can into the pool that's going into the economy.

All the busses and tools required for maintenance are capital assets amortized and expensed over years, while the roads and the other infrastructure are hugely expensive and are rarely used as efficiently as they can be.

I wonder if they take into account the fact that if there are no bus routes (or less of them) there is a certain population of people that won't be able to work, and those worker pay taxes and put money back into the economy. Probably impossible to know what the effect is in total and I wouldn't be surprised if its not part of the TCO formula.

None of those should be needed. Get more people riding and they take care of security.

wheelchairs are hard - but the driver strapping them in is robbing everyone else of their valuable time so we need a better soultion anyway

Every bus in Copenhagen has a button next to the door to lower the wheelchair ramp, but I have never seen anyone use it. I've never seen a wheelchair on a bus.

The metro and suburban trains have level boarding (the platform is at exactly the same level as the floor of the train so it's very easy for a wheelchair user to wheel themselves in). I've still only seen wheelchairs users on these trains once or twice.

I suspect wheelchair users prefer to call the disability taxi service. It's free for wheelchair users and blind people [1]. I don't know if this service is more or less expensive to provide than adapting buses and trains, but it is probably easier for everyone.

[1, in Danish] https://www.moviatrafik.dk/flexkunde/flexhandicap

> about half your costs are the bus driver

(Genuine question) is this true around the globe, or is that US-specific?

We were in Portugal over the summer and travelled with Flixbus (for the first time ever) to get from Porto to Lisbon. Were impressed by the high-quality service and great value for money. Wonder how much the driver makes per hour?

Once you have self-driving, you don't _need_ buses.

Large buses are fundamentally inefficient, they can never be made competitive compared to cars. And the main source of inefficiency is the number of stops and fixed routes.

You can easily solve all the transportation problems with mild car-pooling. Switching buses and personal cars to something like 8-person minibuses will result in less congestion and about 2-3 times faster commutes than the status quo. Only large dense hellscapes like Manhattan will be an exception.

You can have a fleet of specialized self-driving taxis for people with disabilities. They can have articulated ramps or other special accommodations.

> We were in Portugal

Notably, Portugal has the lowest income, by far, of any Western European country. I would expect their bus drivers make considerably less than equivalent bus drivers in the US.

Taking a look at NYC or SF bus, are you sure that more riders solve security issues?

Yeah I remember once doing the math, and it takes a relatively high level of ridership before a bus (or train) reaches the per-passenger efficiency of something like a Civic Hybrid carrying three passengers. We have a number of routes in my local area that I think could be more quickly and economically served by replacing the full size bus with something much smaller.

That's relatively similar to how my local (US) municipality handles disabled passengers. All of the big infrastructure supports wheelchairs, but it is only occasionally used. Disabled people are served by mini-buses which operate point-to-point and charge them the same fare they'd pay for the big bus.

US - though richer countries arounde the world have wages close to the us. Portugal as the other reply said will have different numbers. Still labor is going to be a large factor.

It's true in developed and developing countries, it's probably not true in all poor countries. I'd guess the driver makes for a larger share of the cost in Portugal than in the US.

But the one most important factor defining the total cost by trip is the number of passengers by trip. If 60 people all show up to pay the driver's daily salary, it gets quite cheap.

general rule of thumb is 5 passangers for a but to break even. Now a civic is a smaller car so it will be better, and you specified 3 passanges whes single occupant is by far more likely - even with those unrealistic assumption a typical bus will do well overall.

I don't disagree, the typical use case isn't great for the car, this was just a thought experiment for what it would look like to use an efficient, reliable passenger car as an alternative to buses.

And since the route is fixed, maybe we could install guides rather than needing a complicated steering mechanism. Then replace inefficient tires with much more efficient metal wheels rolling on the guides....

> general rule of thumb is 5 passangers for a but to break even.

"Break even" how? A bus has a road footprint of about 15 cars (it's more than the physical bus length because it also occupies the road during stops and is less maneuverable).

15 cars have the occupancy of about 25 people.

> even with those unrealistic assumption a typical bus will do well overall.

Nope. Buses absolutely fail in efficiency. They pollute WAY more than cars, and they have fundamental limitations like the frequency.

And with that, we can scale it up and have multiple chains of these buses used for mass transport. Heck, in some fantasy land we can really speed up the bus and have it trek across the the continent in a few hours!

>the driver strapping them in is robbing everyone else of their valuable time

Oh so we're now fine putting more of our tax dollars into specialized disability services? If our time is more valuable, this is a steal.

Wheelchairs, sometimes multiple, are on Chicago buses all the time. Also rolling grocery trolleys, walkers (especially for dialysis patients where they have a medical functions) and also old people whose legs don't work so good and need the bus lowered.

Those services are pretty different to local bus routes - people book ahead, tickets aren’t covered by student passes or subsidized by employers, people care a lot more about comfort and are much less likely to be daily riders, etc.

And then we need to make a change to the route.... oops.

They also contribute to pollution when they are stopped and you have 10 cars idling behind them because there's no room to pass. Repeat every 2 blocks.

No we don’t. Put another one in if need arises.

Federal subsidies don't stop at paying for much of the bus purchase costs, they are also paying for much of the roads and bridges the busses run on. Subsides cover of the operating costs, especially labor and energy. And at the very end, the reason most localities are able to offer free rides or very low cost rides is because federal dollars are subsidizing the final ride fares.

It's paying either way. I'd rather pay with money.

snip

e: after looking at the numbers again, i was wrong.

> A bus has a road footprint of about 15 cars

What's this supposed to mean? I can't even try to take it at face value, it's ridiculous.

In bumper to bumper traffic they might take up 2 cars worth of footprint. At higher speeds it's even less as the footprint of each vehicle equals "vehicle length + following distance". At 30km/h (8.3 m/s) and minimal 1s following distance, the "footprint" of a 5m long car is 13m, and the footprint of a 12m long bus is 20m. At highway speeds their footprint is almost equivalent to cars.

> it also occupies the road during stops

I've never seen a bus block a busy city road. Either way this is an easily solvable problem stemming from poor design and lack of investment and not some inherent issue with this mode of transportation.

> They pollute WAY more than cars

Citation?

I'm the same. When brought up for policy, the results tend to be very disappointing, though.

Predictability has value.

For example because "we need to make a change to the route" type people are around, your bus line can be taken away from you.

Because tracks aren't moved as easily, people rely on them, plan around them and you get things like increased property values because (and overall higher quality of life, especially around tram lines) due to that.

It is absolutely not feasible (yet), most of the job of the bus driver is knowing when to break the "rules", because someone is parked in the bus stop, or traffic is backed up so it make sense to stop a bit before the stop to let people off, or when to stop for longer than usual because someone needs to use the bike rack on the front, or when to use the bus kneeling feature because someone with mobility issues needs to get on or off, or when to skip a stop because your bus is too full and there's another right behind you, etc.

This is ignoring payment issues (hopefully it would be free anyway), answering riders' questions, being nice and letting someone off halfway between stops because it's 2am and pouring and they're the only one on the bus, and so on. I guess the general theme is that unlike Waymo where everything is ordered and planned out ahead of time and the car just needs to go from A to B, a self-driving bus will need to be constantly updating its plan in real time based on the conditions outside and what people on the bus need. It's not like a train where it can always stop in the exact same place and open the doors for a pre-defined amount of time.

It's obviously not impossible, but bus driving is much more complex than taxi driving despite the predictable route.

The market clearing wage only applies in economic textbooks, in a perfectly competitive market with balanced supply and demand. The US public transportation sector has major supply/demand imbalances and is a regulated market.

Also the median weekly wage in the US is currently $1196 a week (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf)

Seattle is currently paying bus drivers $31.39 an hour, 40x = $1256 (https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/metro/about/careers/drive-for...). And I'm sure the pay is less in less affluent/dense US cities.

It's not exactly apples to apples because the bls figure is nationwide and doesn't include healthcare benefits, and king county metro may have better than average healthcare, but at least ballparking this: No, public bus drivers are not paid "well above" the median wage

Edit: I found this listing on indeed for greyhound bus drivers (the closest comparison I could think of in the private sector) and starting rate is $28-$31 in Seattle (https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=2516c81006044ec8).

This honestly makes a lot of sense, particularly because the number of people that need wheelchairs is so much smaller than the general population.

I visit hospitals pretty frequently and while it's not never that I see someone in a wheelchair, it's not every day and it's definitely not a majority of the visitors.

When I'm out and about in public, I basically never see wheelchair users.

It makes sense to simply have a taxi service instead. Far more convenient for the wheelchair user and you don't need to retrofit every bus with wheelchair access.

Yes, this is simply a well known fact.

You can look up the NYPD report on crime for the month of june the total amount of reported crime was 427 for all forms of transport (metro, bus, etc). 3.6 million people use public transport in NYC daily.

No matter where you are, you'll never drive that number to 0. But if you wanted to make it better then you'd stop positioning the police to catch turnstile jumpers and you start positioning police to ride public transport during low ridership times to prevent incident.

i think main thrust, you are right that the numbers are less extreme than i had recalled. SF (which i imagine is the top end) is $31-$47 range or so. i see lower ($25) for greyhound than you do, but frankly that seems unreasonably low so i think “salary.com” is not giving me solid numbers there.

You could have trams and trains with level boarding which helps people who don't have disabilities too, costs less, takes less space in the city, makes less noise, needs less maintenance, and moves more people.

You could help set up the self driving bus for success. Make bus stops a clearway for other vehicles. In other words, if you stop there you get fined and possibly towed. Bus dashcam can help here.

The bike rack is an excellent feature where US beats my country. Well done. I think you'd need a button to ask for more time. And a Tokyo-like culture of respect for this all to work.

It's not starting $31-$47 it's $31 starting and as you build seniority and tenure you can get up to $47. https://careers.sf.gov/classifications/?classCode=9163&setId...

Indeed shows an active listing in SF for Greyhound for the same amount as Seattle. Greyhound appears to have a single national salary scrolling through different cities. https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=ad2e68b167688669

Except that they don't cost less. And are more inconvenient, especially if you can't move a lot. And they're slower, and will require you to make a transfer. And don't run at night.

But otherwise,yeah. Sure.

If/when we get to self-driving buses I'd like to see them with a security guard on board or someone like the train ticket guy. I wouldn't feel comfortable as a woman getting on driver-less bus with strangers without a bus representative there too. With existing buses, I've had bus drivers stop the bus and kick someone off who was creating a dangerous situation and I feel even just the presence of a bus driver kept some people's behavior in check.

carrying 3 passengers is doing all the work for you there

Portuguese salaries are miserable

I mean it's already illegal to stop in the bus stop, and in some cities the buses have cameras to catch offenders, but people still do it. What would help is bus rapid transit (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit), which involves a lot of dedicated and separated bus lanes to make it a bit more like a train, but that only solves some of the problems I mentioned.

Crazy diesel busses are still legal to begin with. Thats basically some form of money laundering at this point.

Or buy 10 Teslas for the same price and offer superior service.

Ah yes 100x more expensive and 10x less practical. How did we get to posting blatant nonsense here.

"Miserable" like in "covers the cost of a $300k machine in 15 years"?

Bus drivers don't get software developer salaries.

> What's this supposed to mean?

A single bus creates as much congestion as around 15 cars. It's a fairly well-known result in urban planning. You can verify by looking at the maximum lane throughput in vehicles per hour.

> At higher speeds it's even less as the footprint of each vehicle equals "vehicle length + following distance".

The commercial speed of buses in cities is around 10-15 mph. There are no "higher speeds" when talking about the city traffic.

> I've never seen a bus block a busy city road. Either way this is an easily solvable problem stemming from poor design and lack of investment and not some inherent issue with this mode of transportation.

I've seen buses blocking multiple cars for a traffic light cycle because buses take so much space. These days, it is apparently considered a feature in the pro-misery community...

> Citation?

For example: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint

This is a very loaded topic. The average raw bus pollution is about 75g CO2e per kilometer, and a passenger EV is around 50g. However, these calculations neglect that a bus needs about 3.5 drivers per bus to be viable. And these drivers become by far the most polluting factor.

As in $1000/month before taxes, with rent for pretty much any apartment costing quite a bit more than that.

That's 10x the cost of drivers though.

Driving a city bus is much, much, _much_ harder than driving a car. Shuttle bus in an airport or something, sure, maybe. But (with the exception of BRT systems with mostly/all segregated routes), I'd expect city buses to be about the most difficult form of transport to automate.

The main cost of running a bus system is drivers, not buses. So that would be horribly expensive.

Also... how small are you imagining buses are? Standard buses here have a capacity of around a hundred people. If you broke them out into cars there simply wouldn't be space on the roads.

> A single bus creates as much congestion as around 15 cars. It's a fairly well-known result in urban planning.

I've never heard anything of the sort and I don't believe it at face value - that's roughly the length of a football field. Perhaps this is true in a specific area with terrible bus infrastructure but where I live, and the majority of places where I've been, bus stops are off the main road so they never block traffic.

> I've seen buses blocking multiple cars for a traffic light cycle because buses take so much space.

As I said, a consequence of bad infrastructure, not an inherent flaw of this mode of transportation. And even if some cars get held up that doesn't necessarily mean that the throughput has been affected - in heavy traffic this gap will be filled by other cars.

> For example: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint

This table lists "Coach (bus)" at 27g CO2e/passenger-km. I don't know why buses are listed three times and they don't clarify, but it sure seems like the figure for passenger EVs represents the average for all types of trips whilst bus service is broken down into long-distance (coach) and local city service, making direct comparison impossible.

Additionally, carbon footprint is one small part of pollution and arguably it's not even the most important one. Ultrafine particles, PM2.5, and noise pollution matter just as much to the local population.

That is worse service. A tesla has low capacity and so cannot handle multiple groups randomly showing up at the same time. The point of great transit is you don't think, the system is ready for you.

Yes, and?

The outcome of that approach is that an important service has uniform low costs to direct consumers, many of whom rely on the service for their quality of life, and many of whom would be unable to afford the service if its costs were passed along to them instead of subsidized via government debt and taxes.

In other words, a public service. That’s a good thing.

Slower? In top speed maybe, but not in time-to-destination (or, given congested streets, average speed).

Trains “require” you to make a transfer? Depends on your city, I guess; many train systems are hub-and-spoke-like enough (and dense enough) that common commutes don’t require any transfers. Also, I’m curious whether bus-centric mass transit requires more or fewer transfers than train-centric or hybrid.

> Slower? In top speed maybe, but not in time-to-destination (or, given congested streets, average speed).

Yep. Transit is ALWAYS slower on average compared to cars. It is faster only in a very narrow set of circumstances.

Try an experiment: drop 10 random points inside a city, and plot routes between them for cars and transit (you can use Google Maps API). Transit will be on average 2-3 times slower, even in the rush hour.

> I've never heard anything of the sort and I don't believe it at face value

Perhaps you should stop listening to propaganda from the ubranists and start digging past the images of happy smiling cyclists riding the bike lanes in perfect weather with the sun shining on them?

> that's roughly the length of a football field.

Yep. That's how bad buses are. Want another fun fact? One bus does the same amount of road damage as 1000-5000 cars. If you have a bus lane, look at it and you'll see that it is much more damaged compared to the nearby lanes, even though it carries far fewer vehicles.

> As I said, a consequence of bad infrastructure, not an inherent flaw of this mode of transportation.

Yes. A well-designed city like Houston will have enough road space so that buses are do not affect the traffic disproportionately. But then it means that such a city does not _need_ buses.

> This table lists "Coach (bus)" at 27g CO2e/passenger-km

It's a UK term for long-distance buses. Yes, they are indeed more efficient than cars. If you can get a bus to drive at freeway speeds without frequent stops, then it becomes extremely efficient.

> Additionally, carbon footprint is one small part of pollution and arguably it's not even the most important one. Ultrafine particles, PM2.5, and noise pollution matter just as much to the local population.

Ok. Let's talk about PM25. If we're talking about the _brake_ _dust_ then buses are absolutely the worst. They emit way more dust per passenger. But I don't believe that this is a problem long-term, EVs barely use frictional brakes and future EV buses should also be able to mitigate the brake wear.

For _tire_ wear, it's more complex. There are no good studies of tire wear that control for the average speed. In most studies, tire wear is simply calculated by weighing the tires and dividing the lost mass by the number of miles traveled. A few studies that tried to measure the direct particulate emissions near highway exits produced results with error bars that make them useless.

Here's a nice overview: https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-11/documents/42...

Noise pollution is a solved problem, btw. EVs are now required to make _artificial_ noise because they are so quiet. Ditto for brake dust, regenerative braking takes care of that.

> Perhaps you should stop listening to propaganda from the ubranists

I know this site is US-centric but excuse me if I don't take anti-public-transport propaganda at face value. I've lived in Europe all of my life and I've been to major US cities on the west coast so I've seen great public transport as well as the car-centric culture with my own eyes.

> Yep. That's how bad buses are.

No, that claim is ridiculous and obviously incorrect - It's laughable, really. Care to [try to] substantiate it?

> One bus does the same amount of road damage as 1000-5000 cars.

Sure, buses do cause more road damage than personal vehicles, but that's hardly a significant factor. Care to list all of the externalities for personal cars? Does parking build and maintain itself? How about all of the opportunity cost for space occupied by parked cars? Injuries caused by impaired drivers?

> A well-designed city like Houston will have enough road space so that buses are do not affect the traffic disproportionately. But then it means that such a city does not _need_ buses.

I have no idea what you meant by this. That doesn't logically follow.

> I've lived in Europe all of my life and I've been to major US cities on the west coast so I've seen great public transport as well as the car-centric culture with my own eyes.

So you're telling me that you've never seen a well-run people-oriented city like Houston?

And I grew up in Europe. I got my driving license around the age of 25, and my first car at 29.

> No, that claim is ridiculous and obviously incorrect - It's laughable, really. Care to [try to] substantiate it?

See?

> Care to list all of the externalities for personal cars? Does parking build and maintain itself? How about all of the opportunity cost for space occupied by parked cars? Injuries caused by impaired drivers?

Care to list all the externalities of buses? Do bus drivers spring out of sea foam and dissolve after the shift? How about all of the opportunity cost for people who can't make commutes that are forbidden by the bus network? The entire human lifetimes wasted every day while waiting for buses?

> Injuries caused by impaired drivers?

Self-driving solved it?

> I have no idea what you meant by this. That doesn't logically follow.

If buses don't affect your traffic flow, then you have enough road space so that residents can just use cars.

The grass is greener where you water it. Try an experiment: don't give over the entire public space to cars, so there's no on-street parking, no surface parking lots, and the driving routes are narrow, and always give priority to people outside a car without them having to wait while pedestrian crossings give priority to cars, and then compare.

Tokyo's a very impractical city. It would be much more practical if all 14,000,000 people owned cars and drove them everywhere all the time. And 100x cheaper!

How did you get to posting blatant nonsense here?