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Why Autonomous Cars Will NEVER Replace Transit
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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Total cost of a bus is ~$122 USD/hour ($165 CAD)
A car costs $729 USD / $988 per month on average and is used 380 hours per year on average. Therefore $23 USD / $31.2 CAD per hour (no driver cost, unlike the bus). Therefore bus costs the same to run as 5 cars.
It depends of service frequency and stop radius, in North America (while there are different definitions), 106 households per sq mile is the line before it starts dropping to rural. That's 6 acres per household.
Assuming they have 2 cars (not a big assumption with that density) and there is a single stop that goes to a transit link 30 minutes away (1 hour round trip) you get the following frequencies:
800 yard radius: 0.65im^2 = 69 households = 138 cars = $1.2m per year = 9,880 bus hours per year = 27 busses per day. And a second stop and you've got a bus every half hour.
Add some bike racks for get a 2400 yard radius: 5.84mi^2 = 619 households= 1,238 cars = $10.8m per year = 88,770 bus hours per year = 243 bus hours per day = 10 busses per hour. A bus every six minutes all day, every day. For houses with 6 acres of property.
That assumes everyone wants to go to the transit link.
I've lived in Japan, and not owned a vehicle. I've lived in a small north American city and taken the bus (I lived on the busiest route) It's orders of magnitude different. I still had to check the bus schedule here in north America. I never even bothered in Japan because the next train was always 2-3 minutes.
Autonomous electric busses are probably the best option for most North American situations, they reduce the per hour operating costs enough that we can absolutely saturate even the least used routes with sub 10 minute service and entice some people out of cars.
Autonomous cars will help though, I think people underestimate how easy and cheap autonomous taxis will become. That combined with buses will probably allow people to give up paying for a dedicated vehicle.