
Tourist buses 'no longer welcome' in Paris city centre - melling
https://www.france24.com/en/20190702-tourist-buses-no-longer-welcome-paris-city-centre
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skybrian
I don't understand. This reduces transportation capacity, and what's more
environmentally friendly than buses? If tourists stop using them, it seems
like whatever they switch to would get more crowded?

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duskwuff
Tourist buses are fundamentally recreational, not a form of transportation.
Their goal is to allow their passengers to see specific things, so they often
use inefficient routes and move slowly to give their passengers a better view.
Most of their passengers ride the bus along a circular path, rather than
boarding or disembarking along the way. (Often, they don't even _allow_
boarding after the tour begins.) As such, they place more load on the road
network than a city bus, without any of the transport benefits.

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skybrian
Well, being able to see the city is a benefit. It still seems like if they
take regular buses (or worse, taxis), it will be more crowded and less
efficient.

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duskwuff
> It still seems like if they take regular buses (or worse, taxis), it will be
> more crowded and less efficient.

Those aren't substitutes. Tourists ride tourist buses to be taken on a guided
tour, not as a means of getting from one place to another. Passenger buses and
taxis don't provide that.

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skybrian
Unless you think tourists will just decide to skip Paris, they are going to
substitute _some_ way of getting around the city and seeing at least some of
the places they want to see, even if it's an imperfect substitute. A guided
tour is one way, exploring on your own with a guidebook is another.

There may be an argument here about induced demand: more capacity results in
more tourists until it gets too inconvenient at some higher level of visits,
and similarly in reverse. But this suggests that removing capacity will result
in bottlenecks due to traffic somewhere else. Things will get worse somehow
until the word gets around and people reduce the number of trips they make.

