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Originally Posted by AZCivic
Makes you wonder why mini-busses aren't more popular. Kind of like short school busses, but for adult transit. It seems that the smallest city busses you ever see are designed to hold at least 30 people still, but like you said, often times have only 5 people on them. You could use a GM full-size van frame at maybe 1/3 of the up front cost and probably 50% of the operating cost and still seat at least 8 to 10 comfortably. With smaller, cheaper mass transit, you could then operate, say, 50% more of them and improve ridership by offering more routes and more frequent pickups.
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That is interesting, because in my city, a group of high school students from my alma mater did a research project regarding the local transit and came to the conclusion that the large busses were costing too much to run and maintain, that they were never ever filled to capacity during the research period and that if the transit system were to survive that it would have to move down to the smaller shuttle busses. The transit system wasn't making enough money to cover their expenses and were being subsidized with monies that were needed in real infrastructure, specifically paving projects. The system did, with the blessing of the sitting city council at that time, move over to Ford based shuttle busses. That was about 5 years ago.
In the meantime, a new transit director was hired from the west side of the state, who doesn't have a clue about how the east side of the state works, the city council changed and it is politically impotent, and the bus drivers union said they were tired of driving glorified Ford vans (who cares what the union thinks, at least they have jobs, there could be another alternate situation here). Any they have sold off all of the Ford shuttle busses, purchase a combination of used and new Gillig Phantoms (huge busses to drive around 4 people in circles all day long, one of which is the driver) and have basically thrown away all the good research they kids did.
On top of that, they have made Wednesdays and Saturdays free days and have extended service out to outlying neighbor cities. And what is the outcomes of this change. We're back to expensive, large busses to haul around a limited number of people. Ridership is way up on Wednesdays and Saturdays, however it drops to normal lows on the rest of the operating days, and ridership numbers from the outlying areas are highly disappointing. Most of the time it is an empty bus hitting the highway to one of these small cities to go pick up no one.
Don't you just love it when government tries to be entrepreneurial. Just think of all the money we would have to pave our roads if we eliminated an unused transit system.