“Giving people more viable alternatives to driving means more people will choose not to drive, so there will be fewer cars on the road, reducing traffic for drivers.”
Concise, easy to understand, and accurate. I have used it at least a dozen times and it is remarkable how well it works.
Also—
“A bus is about twice as long as a car so it only needs to have four to six passengers on board to be more efficient than two cars.”
When the bus driver decides he can run on a yellow light to turn right (left side drive country), when there is not enough space to keep that length of a vehicle in the target road.
If it were 3 cars, 2 would go and fit in 1 lane each of the target road and the third would show some understanding and wait for the next green.
You expected a high effort answer with a diagram? Sorry. You decided to *ass me. Now read what’s above and visualise it yourself.
so basically, the scenario is “the bus driver is a bad driver and the people in cars are not bad drivers”. seems a bit situational.
IMO, they need to be around the same level of drivers to make said decision.
If the car drivers in question were any better, they would think “there is only a single car space in the target lane” and not jump the yellow, because that would cause that section to clear later (I, on a bicycle wouldn’t go ahead). The 3rd driver in this case, just realised there was no space, so didn’t go forward.
The only difference is that the bus driver (who needs to be better than the car driver to prevent similar stuff) caused the current junction to be blocked, just because of the vehicle size, causing other paths (which were free before) to now be jammed too.
I was told in my childhood that a driving license for larger vehicles had more stringent requirements. Guess that’s not the case anymore. But it doesn’t change the fact that one actually needs to be a better driver to be driving a bus. ⇒ More money expected ⇒ More passengers needed, lest the better driver will leave and the bus company will hire a cheap one.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Maybe nobody should run yellow lights. Sounds like that is the problem in your scenario, not the vehicles.
You’re right. But there are shoddy drivers [1] everywhere.
Just that when the shoddy driver is in a bus, it has a much higher impact.
Bus lanes didn’t really fix the problem here, due to them being too inconsistent. So now those lanes just tend to be the slowest lane and the busses use the faster lanes [2].
and people who are in too much of a hurry to realise they are trapping themselves ↩︎
this is not a rule thing, just happened as busses didn’t care enough about the bus lane and others went into the empty lane they saw ↩︎
The solution that many Bus Rapid Transit systems implement is giving buses priority at lights.
That is a good way to do it, but requires the bus lanes to be properly arranged in the first place.
It’s useless to give priority to a vehicle that is packed behind other vehicles.
Also, considering the amount of busses and variety of bus routes over here (all of which tend to be mostly packed), it can’t really be considered doable everywhere.
There have been some places where separate, divided lanes have been set for a special bus service [1], but they turn out to be only heavily used during the rush hours, while during other times, tend to be mostly empty, again, because not every road has enough width to break into a bus lane.
kind of like a tram service, just with more versatility in case some areas don’t have space for a separate lane ↩︎
An everyday occurence I assume.
Specially in this rainy season.
When the slow traffic is caused by cars, I know it will be fine in ~10 minutes.
When I see trucks and busses, I am re-routing.