“Giving people more viable alternatives to driving means more people will choose not to drive, so there will be fewer cars on the road, reducing traffic for drivers.”
Concise, easy to understand, and accurate. I have used it at least a dozen times and it is remarkable how well it works.
Also—
“A bus is about twice as long as a car so it only needs to have four to six passengers on board to be more efficient than two cars.”
“A bus is only helpful when it actually runs regularly. And by ‘regularly’ I don’t mean one each morning and another one each afternoon”.
I absolutely agree.
But if mass transit had the same investment as road infrastructure gets, it’d be a slam dunk.
somehow even turborural areas here in sweden can manage it, so there’s no reason other places can’t do the same.
the crucial thing is that you don’t have to run public transport literally everywhere, just run robust services between population centres (as many ones as you can manage) and build infrastructure such that people can get to the closest stop and transfer onto the public transport there.
I don’t know what it’s like in other places but I tend to find that in cities with an actual dedicated serious transportation agency, busses run every hour at minimum. Even regional busses in the small city where I attended university ran 6-8 times a day per line for three very similar routes. Local busses ran every 20-40 minutes depending on time of day. That’s shocking good for a city of 50,000 in America.
It might surprise you, but there are people living outside of large cities.
The point seems kinda moot outside of cities.
Are you expecting a bus stop outside every farmhouse? Who’s going to ride it, cows?
Or in a small town where everything is reachable on foot within fifteen minutes anyway and the road has like 2 cars per minute? Regional bus service that takes you to nearby towns that comes a few times a day is probably as good as it gets.
And exactly that makes people drive in cars into the cities.