this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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So, I'm not the previous commenter, and I'm not about to suggest we should ban cars outright (there are quite obviously situations where cars are needed... I mean, anyone who lives in an isolated place literally has no better option)... That said, I would love to see cities free of cars entirely.
Buses are more damaging to roads, yes (although I'm confident that your 10,000 number is hyperbole, I found a source which suggested than an empty bus does ~170 times the damage of an SUV, or 1,700 times the damage of a compact), even per passenger - which is surprising. But the benefits are quite significant in other regards - energy, pollution, road space, safety, etc. Plus, you can in fact design busses which are less damaging to roads by giving them more wheels!
Road damage is a relatively small part of why people like me want to see cars be (where practical) a thing of the past. There is a place for busses in that world, alongside other less damaging forms of transit - especially bikes and trams within cities where busses would be the competition. Certain routes are too far for a bike to be practical and too sparse to warrant a tram, so busses make sense in that case.
Well it might be off, as there are other factors, but I wasn't meaning it as hyperbole - road damage is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight, and a typical bus weighs about 10 times the weight of a compact, so damage would be roughly 10^4 times larger. This is called the "Generalised Fourth Power Law" and there are tons of links about it:
https://camdencyclists.org.uk/2020/06/the-fourth-power-rule-cyclelicious/
(Which btw, you can apply the other way and state that you need an insane amount of bicycles to match the road damage of a single car).
If they took the top end bracket of SUV weights and the bottom end of bus weights, they could have reached vastly different numbers. I used 1800 kg (large sedan or compact SUV) and 18000 kg for a bus (the mercedes Benz citaro starts at roughly 18500 kg), to keep the numbers simple.
That's reasonable - the source I checked didn't use the fourth power, and it was taking into account the number of wheels as well. Anyway, I think the point still stands that just like cars there is a place for busses in a more sensibly designed transit system, despite this one specific disadvantage. Bikes are obviously superior in many ways to other transport but are only really practical over quite short distances (I'm not averse to cycling 10+ miles to get somewhere but I'm gonna need a shower when I arrive lol).