And once again, I question the bus number of 10000 people per hour per lane. Buses can be 8.5 feet wide, and the articulated buses are 60 feet long (regular buses are either 30 or 40 feet long). That's 510 square feet for the biggest buses. As a rule of thumb, you can pack people into a bus up to about 5.5 square feet per person, which is about 92 people on an articulated bus. Keep in mind that the wheel wells in low-floor buses take up a huge amount of room that take away passenger area, and there are more sophisticated ways to figure capacity for each type of bus, but this is a reasonable estimate.
To get 10000 people per hour at 92 per bus you would need 109 buses, or one bus every 33 seconds. This would lead to bunching worse than the 30s. Especially if buses are crowded to 92 people per bus, and if some of those riders are in wheelchairs, the stops + pull in + pull out time would need to be longer than 33 seconds.
And NO FAIR trying to imagine that buses pull over into a curb lane for boarding and alighting, with multiple bus bays per stop. That's using more than one lane, which violates the premise of this thought exercise! It's also something that rail doesn't need to do.
Ah the economists. They have this ideal that everyone makes rational decisions.
Anyone that has grown out of their 18 year old, libertarian phase -- knows that this is just not true.
That people make irrational decisions that SEEM rational to themselves. Most people that are (somewhat) honest with themselves about why they drive instead of take transit is that they want to FEEL in control. They want to blast their music at their own volume. Have a smoke. Drink their coffee. And not be able to take whatever route they want.
Why do they want these things? Culture.
Individual control is at the heart of our American experiment. And that comes down to individual choices and being able to make them (smoking, coffee, music, route).
My foreign-born partner things this is all ludicrous. He'd much rather have the freedom to standup or sit down, to move about the car (and change cars -- he hates Metro because you are trapped in one car, and the bus? forget about it).
That's his idea of personal identity: Freedom of movement. Culture is a bitch to change. Of course. But the economists love to ignore it. Because they have at the core a model of behavior that ignores intangibles.
Using 50 people per bus, we get about one bus every 25 seconds to move 10,000 people per lane per hour. As for the idea of buses starting and stopping in traffic lanes, that's a red herring, as the discussion was obviously about freeway lanes. The number of cars per hour would also drop radically if you included traffic lights and parallel parkers.
That said, the advantage of 'bus rapid transit' over plain old buses is apparently very little compared with the advantage of LRT.
Notice how the so-called 'Libertarians' are quick to assign a conspiracy motif to any individual who objects to the roadbuilding industry, while ignoring entirely the massive lobbying efforts of real estate interests, the homebuilding industry, paving contractors, the trucking industry, state roadworkers unions, and automobile industry.
I would say the Libertarians are honest- when they're bought, they stay bought.
DC 1974 is right. Many of my foreign-born friends are the first to adopt the car-centric culture as in most places in the world public transit is the norm and when they get here they see the freedom of being able to pick your transport and equate it w/ true freedom. I have the freedom to get on a bicycle when I want and not spend 4 hours a day on the road- as many- if not most- of my co-workers do. this is MY knid of freedom.
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