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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34981 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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But most city busses are mostly empty most of the day, so they are horribly inefficient uses of fuel on average.

Correct. But you have to run them (or at least some of them, and it's not always obvious which ones), or people drop out of the system entirely and you lose ridership from the more-utilized buses.

Which is why you have to calculate efficiency based on typical ridership rather than assuming everything is going to be at full capacity all the time. One of those urbanist YouTube channels ran a video a while back complaining about Chicago's transit system, particularly one suburban spot on the Metra that had trains running at intervals so infrequent that if you missed the train you'd be stuck there for two hours before the next one came. Yeah, obviously it's an argument against taking the train if there's a possibility you get stuck at work late and are SOL. But while running trains at fifteen minute intervals on every line, and having enough lines to reach most of the in-demand places may increase ridership, you're also going to be running a lot of empty or near-empty trains.

I’d need to see the workings out here. If the carbon usage of a bus is as bad as ten times the normal car, it starts to come better than a car at ten passengers. Or slightly more since not all car journeys are single passenger (although most are). Whatever about US cities that would be rare in most countries for city or regional buses to be that empty - think a London double decker off peak.

There's a point when the quantitative change in the schedule becomes a qualitative one. These near-empty trains greatly increase ridership at other hours, because more people are willing to use a service they can rely on.

No argument from me there; I'm just saying that these empty trains need to be factored into efficiency calculations.

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