> 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.

▲

asdff 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The bus driver is making what 60k maybe 90k a year? According to LA metro their new electric fleet is costing about $1.1m per bus. It would take over a decade for labor to exceed just the initial outlay. I'm not sure that busses are even used that long before replacement.

In terms of bathroom breaks, I've seen the driver pull over to use the mcdonalds or grocery store bathrooms so that is probably "free." There are only a few places in LA metro system where there is a purpose built layover facility where one might imagine there being a metro maintained bathroom facility. Most layover facilities are just dedicated street parking for busses to queue, such as the one at the end of Western blvd and franklin where I've seen the drivers utilize the Lazy Acres grocery store facilities.

▲

bluGill 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On rail the largest costs are building and maintaining the rail until you get to very high frequency. For most rail in the US the largest factor in maintenance is weather and so you could run a lot more trains without changing the costs much. You do need to buy more trains, and they will need to be cleaned, but it wouldn't be hard to get enough to people on board to pay those incremental costs. (in the US the bottleneck is often an expensive tunnel that is shared between several not busy lines, each line could itself handle many more trains all day than they have at the peak without changing maintenance costs - but the tunnel is full and it costs too much to build a new one - this is why so many in transit are focusing on construction costs - if we can build a short tunnel we unlock a lot of better transit)

▲

reaperducer 3 days ago | parent [-]

On rail the largest costs are building and maintaining the rail until you get to very high frequency.

In the cities I've lived, it's not quite that.

Building rail is a lot of dollars, but politicians are often happy to throw money at that problem. It's good for a dozen industries, like construction.

But that money cannot then be used to operate the rail long-term. That burden is on the city entirely.

I've lived in two cities that turned down millions of dollars in federal transit grants because they didn't have the money for maintenance and operation.

	▲	bluGill 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Capital costs are paid differently and so we can often safely ignore construction costs as they are a different budget. Putting maintenance into that capital bucket though is accounting fraud and illegal. If you have a rail line the largest cost is regular maintenance which is based on time not wear until you have a very large number of trains running. So my point stands even if you separate the buckets.

▲

jdeibele 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Bus drivers in the US are often behind a plexiglass shield, have a panic button, etc. and with reason.

If buses ran more often, they hopefully would become attractive to a lot more people. Anecdotally, I think most issues happen later at night where there are a handful of people on the bus. Having more people all the time would hopefully discourage anti-social behavior even if it wouldn't prevent incidents.