You could have a guy making minimum wage sit in the back and tell people not to act stupid.

That would be much cheaper than a union bus driver who can clear 100k.

Safer too since bus drivers often go tons of overtime which isn't great for being alert.

The "driver" could become more armed security and janitor.

For the company maybe, but for everyone else it is worse. Taxis are worse for the environment than cars because you have to count all the driving around empty picking people up (demand is rarely even in all directions). Rideshare is only of limited use outside fixed routes as people have places to be an detouring to pick up someone else makes them mad.

A better bus and stop design eliminates more of that. You can have call ahead for help if you need to. A busy bus route normal people will be glad to help the disabled as well so long as what they need to do isn't hard and doesn't take much time (which it shouldn't - see better design...). For the rest paratransit should take them because despite the higher costs disabled people if they need to much help are taking time from everyone else who wants to get someplace not wait while someone is slowly loaded onto the bus.

The only people who say that are people who are justifying their not riding the bus - which is probably not usable for them anyway. Too many people do ride the bus all over the world (even in the US) to think that is really true. Statisticians and Psychologists have long known people lie about their reasons for doing something.

i was curious so i looked this up: LA Metro (combined bus and rail) has a monthly ridership of like 25 million [0]. that's nearly a million people taking shared public transit every day. anecdotally, i chose to ride metro rail over driving when i had a "real" commute. lots of people do.

people in NY and Chicago are fiercely defensive of their mass transit options. the bay area would be a terrible place without BART and Muni.

for all its problems, shared mass transit is a net good and there are millions of people in this country who prefer it.

[0] - https://opa.metro.net/MetroRidership/

People seem happy to get short-haul flights when driving is an option, so riding with strangers can’t be the issue.

The total cost of a bus is just over $100/hour (I last checked in 2019, so a bit more from inflation), and a driver directly makes around $30/hr plus benefits easially will put you over $50. Now add in all training and management that isn't directly per hour but if you didn't have a driver you wouldn't pay. You do have maintenance and fuel costs per hour, insurance and the cost of a bus. There are are a lot of "it depends" and I've never seen a formal analysis of the true costs, but to round numbers we can say half the costs are the driver and be close enough for discussion.

If we take the same $ and get rid of the drivers we can run twice as many buses and that increased service will get a lot of riders who previously thought the service was too bad. Though you will need to run the additional service for a few years before people figure out service is no longer bad and start using it.

Now we do have to assume some intelligence in bus routing. There are a lot of bad bus routes in cities that will never get more riders because of how stupid they are.

Of course you are right that politics gets in the picture. Rail gets far too much attention for projects where the lowly bus is cheaper for otherwise identical service (and where rail is needed it is often done wrong). As already pointed out unions will hate this plan and they have power to screw the rest of the population (who because they don't ride now don't think they would if this plan happened) and the environment (they care about the environment only after their own self interests.

Still the numbers work on paper: self driving buses should get a lot more riders on yoru bus system because you can afford to run more service.

> Are driver costs really the primary thing stopping increased bus route service?

On rail I'm not as sure but on bus yes. Drivers are the largest cost associated with a bus line. There's also a whole set of downstream costs like bathroom breaks which requires that routes are aligned with bathroom stops and that bathrooms are kept in good working order. Breaks also decrease bus frequency (humans need breaks!) and running more buses is often limited by the number of drivers you can hire.

However bus drivers often play a dual role in US transit of discouraging anti-social behavior so it's unclear to me if you could even get rid of the bus driver and the associated inefficiencies or you'd just need to replace them with a police officer and deal with the exact same problems.

Many bus drivers are unhappy having to play this role, so that's also a factor.

Are driver costs really the primary thing stopping increased bus route service?

It's usually that $transit_company needs $xxx,xxx,xxx to do a good job.

Politicians will only give it $yy,yyy,yyy to do the job.