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.

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.

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.