4 ms·
busses are so bad here to be honest. a lot of metropolitan cities solved this problem by having frequent and efficient bus lines connecting to major train/tram/
by bgnn 2y ago
busses are so bad here to be honest. a lot of metropolitan cities solved this problem by having frequent and efficient bus lines connecting to major train/tram/metro lines. Randstad is one big metropolis without a coherent public transportation planning.
I moved here from Istanbul 12 years ago. the progress there was positive in this timeframe while in Randstad it was backwards to be honest. public transportation became more expensive and unreliable. busses are often empty and they seem to compensate this by increasing prices and cutting down the frequency, so it becomes less reliable for people to use it..
my commute to work is 15 km. it's 20 min by car without traffic but post-Covid traffic is so bad that it's 50 mins in average (1 hour+ on Tuesdays). bus is 30 mins with 1 connection but often I miss the connection and wait 15 mins, so it's 45 realistically. both are bad options, so I cycle instead in half an hour with my e-bike. if it's bad weather I take the car because busses are not on time so I can't plan being at the office for a meeting or so. plus, bus is much more expensive than my not so fuel efficient old car. go figure.
- systemtest 2y agoYes prices are problematic. The above mentioned 20 kilometers to work is a 5 euro bus ticket. A bus full of people should not cost 25 cents per kilometer per person. It's slightly cheaper than my car but it should be a lot cheaper because so many people share one vehicle.
- briandear 2y agoYou have to pay the driver, benefits, maintenance of stops, and subsidize all the miles where the bus is below capacity.
- systemtest 2y agoAnd we have to pay the shareholders of Connexxion, Qbuzz, Keolis and Arriva.
- bgnn 2y agoThis!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- iggldiggl 2y agoLet's assume a driver's salary of 18 €/h. A rule of thumb I've heard is that vacation, sick days, social security etc. etc. approximately double that cost to the company, so 36 €/h. 20 kph average speed is already a somewhat generous value for a regular non-BRT city bus line, but let's use it for simplicity's sake, which gives 1,80 €/km driver's costs. Another rough value of thumb for city buses is that they use roughly about 30 l/100 km, which adds about 0,50 €/km, so 2,30 €/km for driver + fuel. A regular city bus holds about 100 passengers, and an average utilisation figure as averaged across the whole day and all routes might be somewhere around 20 %. So an average of 20 passengers per bus at all times, which means 11.5 cents per kilometre for driver and fuel. Now add-in capital cost for the bus itself, maintenance and other ancillary stuff and unfortunately 25 cents per kilometre isn't all that much all of a sudden. (If you can read some German, somebody did a more complete modelling of costs at https://prof.bht-berlin.de/fileadmin/prof/jschlaich/200811_Fr_JS_Kostenmodelle_NAHVERKEHR.pdf https://prof.bht-berlin.de/fileadmin/prof/jschlaich/200811_F..., and with some assumed fictitious but presumably plausible values ended up at 3,26 €/vehicle-km for a city bus operation in 2008 – and both (driver) pay and fuel have increased above inflation since then.)