> Agreed, but the question is whether people would be more wasteful with 100% free buses, taking more trips and negating that benefit.
It's worth mentioning that with public transit, more trips does not contribute linearly to more waste because many riders can take a single bus. Sure, it's probably somewhat more expensive to operate a full bus than an empty one, but there's a net benefit when compared to the cost of operating individual vehicles for all those riders instead.
Hmm... Unless a bus system is initially extremely inefficient, I think the number of buses in a city is always going to have to scale linearly with the number of riders. You shouldn't be having bus routes that are almost all empty to begin with if you're making an efficiency argument about public transportation.
I agree that number of busses will scale linearly with the number of riders, but if we consider a single bus, waste will not scale linearly with the addition of passengers.
The situation I'm trying to capture is one where there's a relatively unpopular route; say we only have one or two busses on the loop. In these cases, more people taking advantage of free busing would only increase the efficiency of the system.
Of course, the utilization of these routes must be high enough to justify the cost; obviously if there is only one passenger for the day it would be cheaper overall for him to just drive.
My city only got buses about five years ago and most times they're empty a lot is due to inefficiency but also the design of the city.
The city streets tend to go away from the city center/harbour but subdivisions are perpendicular to those streets, cross town streets are terribly disorganized.
It all ends up with buses going one way but the people who use it want to go 90 degree angle to where the bus goes. Add to that buses leave at times not suitable for the population e.g. people get to work at 8am but the buses arrive at 6am , it's a joke but at least we have a bus system.
It's worth mentioning that with public transit, more trips does not contribute linearly to more waste because many riders can take a single bus. Sure, it's probably somewhat more expensive to operate a full bus than an empty one, but there's a net benefit when compared to the cost of operating individual vehicles for all those riders instead.