An Ode to the Bus

I will spend a lot of time on this blog and in real life explaining why I love trains, miss trains, want trains. But I was recently discussing online with a friend how railway forms of transit are unfairly overstressed above (good, well-implemented) bus lines, so I wanted to give at least a little equal time to the wonders of buses. 

1. Flexibility and Interconnectivity 

Much as I love a good rail connection, buses are automatically capable of same-stop interchanges and easy connections, since they all are capable of using and do use the roads we already have. For the same reason, a bus line is inherently more flexible than a rail line, since it can be moved without anything but a new sign or stop--or nothing at all if, like most of Davenport, you just treat every corner as a potential stop and don't build anything. While that might be confusing on a small street that might or might not have a bus, if you route them down main streets and main streets always have a bus, changing routings can be extremely easy and cheap.

Tripping hither, tripping thither, nobody knows why or whither.

At the same time, given technology (mostly smartphones but also GPS and good stop displays) you can communicate such changes easily to your audience.

2. Cost

There's no question that this:

costs less than this:

 

to build, maintain, and even operate. Yes, sometimes the per passenger operations are cheaper given the volume of passengers on a heavy metro, especially if you can go driverless like Vancouver. But then an empty train is penalized more than an empty bus, so especially where service may be marginal or highly variable, buses tend to be cheaper.

This may not matter if you're London, running everything all at once, but it sure does if you're somewhere smaller and have a small budget.

3. Force Multiplier

This is sort of a combination of the above, but cheapness, flexibility, and Interconnectivity make the bus the ultimate force multiplier in transit operations. A bus can make things happen that you couldn't justify another form of transit for, whether that's going places you couldn't get to, running hours you couldn't justify otherwise, or just increasing density of transit. There's a reason London runs so many buses despite having a million transit modes; it's because the bus makes everything better together.

The ability to pick a doubledecker or single contributes to this too.

A bus isn't just a secondclass transit option; it's the workhorse of the transit world. Yes, there are routes that need transit beyond the bus (good luck with a bus-based Elizabeth Line alone) but that's in addition to the bus, not removing the bus. The bus deserves to be done well, and when it is it's an absolutely vital piece of an effective transit plan.