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Is there such a thing as being too safe? Jeff Kaufman writes that buses are much safer than cars, by about a factor of 67 but buses are not very popular and one of the main reasons is that if you look at situations where people who can afford private transit take mass transit instead, speed is the main factor. According to Kauffman, we should look at ways to make buses faster so more people will ride them, even if this means making them somewhat more dangerous. Kauffman presents some ideas, roughly in order from "we should definitely do this" to "this is crazy, but it would probably still reduce deaths overall when you take into account that more people would ride the bus": Suggestions include not to require buses to stop and open their doors at railroad crossings, allow the driver to start while someone is still at the front paying, allow buses to drive 25mph on the shoulder of the highway in traffic jams where the main lanes are averaging below 10mph, and leave (city) bus doors open, allowing people to get on and off any time at their own risk. "If we made buses more dangerous by the same percentage that motorcycles are more dangerous than cars," concludes Kauffman, "they would still be more than twice as safe as cars."
(Score: 2) by ledow on Saturday March 19 2016, @04:40PM
The assertions are just plain wrong.
Given away by the one item, where buses should be allowed to pass slower-moving traffic. That slower moving traffic is THE CARS! We're not choosing cars because they are faster, quite obviously!
I don't use buses, or trains, or any public transport. Not because I want to burn up the atmosphere, or be a dick, but because they don't fulfill my needs.
Buses - they travel on the same roads as me. They aren't noticeably slower (some bus drivers are downright dangerous!). They do stop all the time. A bus that doesn't stop all the time means you can't get on the damn thing. As they travel on the same road, there is no advantage unless that road has a hard shoulder or bus lane they can use (hard shoulder = emergency lane for stopping on a motorway in case of a breakdown, by the way). And you can get that same advantage by a) not having bus lanes or b) opening up the hard shoulders to normal traffic when there's not a breakdown. We already do the latter. And reserving an entire lane for buses doesn't make the buses noticeably faster unless the entire route is a bus lane, and unless opening that up as a second/third normal lane wouldn't just alleviate all the traffic anyway.
Besides that, the routes are fixed. There is no bus that goes even close to my workplace. The buses that go in that direction take roundabout routes by popular places (i.e. traffic-heavy places), and make me change buses several times to get close to where I want to go. They also are subject to the same breakdowns, traffic, and problems as ordinary vehicles (because most places DON'T have those special exceptions listed above). So we're already at a loss. And then you add in that I can't load lots of stuff on the bus without carrying it and finding a space for it. I can't invite a passenger for free. I can't use them out of hours. I have to sit next to lots of smelly, noisy, moving people who constantly disturb the journey. You get the idiots who run for the bus and so it waits for them to catch up. You get the idiots without the correct change, or the wrong Oyster card and so delay every stop. You get the screaming kids and the old ladies.
And the cost? Depending on the route it can be no cheaper than the petrol. So the car is a one-off cost that allows me to spend roughly the same amount as I would on a bus (But I probably HAVE to have a car anyway, for shopping, leisure, etc. so the cost of the car is pretty much already out of the picture). I'm sure the bus burns less fuel, but then you have the profit, cost of the bus, cost of the infrastructure and drivers, etc. that has to come from taxes or bus fares. So actually, in the long run, even if it was a viable method and I happened to live and work on the same popular route, it would cost me more. In London, the max price is £4.50 for a day's travel on as many buses as you like. Over 4 weeks (20 days) of commuting, I wouldn't spend £90 in petrol. Not even close. Probably half in fact. So unless I can get a pretty lucky route and work somewhere I could probably cycle to quite easily anyway, I'm losing money even taking into account maintenance and other costs. (P.S. I only spent that much on petrol commuting when I was literally going from one end of the city to the another, a round trip of tens of miles, taking over an hour and a half even by motorway for most of the way... but my employer compensated me, and there is NO WAY that any bus would ever do that journey quick enough that I could ever have used it - even the Tube - subway - couldn't compete and that only needed one change of line).
But it's also the time that kills. Even if the speed of a bus was faster than a car, the stop-starts, the weird routes, the changing of buses, etc. just to get close to where you want, plus the walk to the stop and the walk from the stop at the other end, plus WAITING FOR THE RIGHT DAMN BUS TO ARRIVE, it means that it's not actually that much faster for the passengers at all, averaged out. Whereas with a car, it's roughly the same speed, but door-to-door and ready whenever you want.
The reason I don't use a bus has very little to do with their overall average speed on the moving part of a journey. In fact, I'm not at all sure that I could argue against scrapping buses entirely, opening up the roads, and just putting the money into subsidised taxi services in the real busy areas instead. And I hate taxis - and trains - even more than I hate buses. Mostly for the same reasons (there's never one around when you want one, they are subject to the same problems still, the stop-starts and loading are what kill the journey time, and you have to GET TO WHERE THEY ARE before you can use them).
Sorry, but even if my car cost more, was slower, and is more polluting, I still need to get to work on time - and that means waiting 20 minutes for a bus to come, and then stop-start all the way to somewhere vaguely in the direction of my workplace is a nonsense. And if you cost that time at my normal working rate, on top of the bus cost, it can easily be 2-3 times more expensive than just driving a car.
And I don't even drive a car anywhere where I know there's going to be traffic as I hate traffic jams just as much (and don't get me started on traffic lights ON roundabouts....). Buses - and other public transport - just don't make sense for the majority of people, but sometimes you have no choice (e.g. the very centre of Central London, etc.). There's a reason we have 35m cars registered in the UK, and 30m working adults. Because you need a car, whether for personal or business, and few people can use public transport as an option. And even those that can would prefer things to "just work better" for cars rather than the buses etc. that they have to catch. My girlfriend only uses public transport because (get this!) she works in a huge hospital in London, and there is NO STAFF PARKING.