Suburban Public Transit

[Build.It]

Has anyone ever wondered why we don't have a larger bus network? I looked it up and apparently it's next to impossible for private companies to provide municipal bus services.

I've thought for a while that it would make more sense for suburban bus routes to simply follow the arterial roads back and forth, and have people get off at whatever intersection they need to make a turn. As opposed to these windy suburban bus routes where it takes 30 minutes to get somewhere that takes 5 minutes by car.

eg. The town of Oakville has roughly 20 arterial roads, and it takes about 20 minutes to traverse each one its entire length. For 10 minute service you would need 4 drivers per route, so 80 drivers total at a given time.

4x $30/hr x 0.33 hr/route = $40 per 20 minutes

You would need to sell ~12 rides every 20 minutes per arterial to at least pay for the driver, or 3 rides every 20 minutes per bus (since there would be 4 buses per arterial). This gets everyone where they need to go about almost as fast as a car, in the most direct way, and there is more than enough demand for the numbers to actually work. There would other costs, like maintenance, capital costs of the buses, gas, insurance etc, but with all that included, there is enough demand to pay for 15 passenger Sprinter buses to traverse the entire length of Third Line, or Upper Middle, or Dorval without making little detours all over the place.