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You can hop on any scheduled flight and say that the plane was flying anyway so there was no added environmental cost in you getting a seat. Low ridership buse

You can hop on any scheduled flight and say that the plane was flying anyway so there was no added environmental cost in you getting a seat. Low ridership buses can form part of a wider network where the busy parts of the network depend on the feeder services. Those feeder services also have to offer round the clock service if people are to be bothered using them. In the UK we got rid of the minor branch lines of the railway network thinking people would drive to their nearest station and complete their journey by rail. It never happened, people stayed in their cars and rail passenger numbers declined. You are never going to have a network with all seats filled at all times. Seen that way then a transport service is getting it wrong if it is always at 100% utilisation.

adrianmonk 7y ago
The airplane thing is interesting because planes are expensive (and airlines are for-profit), so they are careful about utilization and keep planes as close to full as practical. Which means if you board that plane, you are altering some stats that someone, somewhere is watching pretty closely. You could easily be helping to tip the balance toward adding another flight to that route or switching to a bigger plane for that flight. I don't know the right math, but I would assume this averages out to something near 1-to-1. That is, if, in the steady state, 1000 people take extra seats on airplanes, presumably it averages out to about 1000 seats of extra capacity being added. And I suppose the concept must apply to low-ridership bus lines. If you ride it, you could tip the balance toward keeping it going rather than canceling it or consolidating it together with other routes. Maybe this is a bit less than 1-to-1, though, because transit agencies aren't just following rider behavior but also trying to fulfill a mission to have good coverage of an area. TLDR, maybe it does matter if you're near a utilization threshold that someone is really paying attention to.

adrianmonk 7y ago

The airplane thing is interesting because planes are expensive (and airlines are for-profit), so they are careful about utilization and keep planes as close to full as practical. Which means if you board that plane, you are altering some stats that someone, somewhere is watching pretty closely. You could easily be helping to tip the balance toward adding another flight to that route or switching to a bigger plane for that flight. I don't know the right math, but I would assume this averages out to something near 1-to-1. That is, if, in the steady state, 1000 people take extra seats on airplanes, presumably it averages out to about 1000 seats of extra capacity being added. And I suppose the concept must apply to low-ridership bus lines. If you ride it, you could tip the balance toward keeping it going rather than canceling it or consolidating it together with other routes. Maybe this is a bit less than 1-to-1, though, because transit agencies aren't just following rider behavior but also trying to fulfill a mission to have good coverage of an area. TLDR, maybe it does matter if you're near a utilization threshold that someone is really paying attention to.