Why Don't We Have More Double-Decker Buses?

as you know I was in the UK a few months ago and as it turns out those folks really love their double decker buses as we know whether it was in central London or winding my way from my Heathrow Industrial Area hotel to my nearest Elizabeth Line Station I saw and wrote a lot of double decker buses over my trip to London all of it made me think a bit about something I've long thought we don't have enough double decker buses in most of the world and in North America of course but are there actually good reasons for that and besides bus fans does anyone even really care if we have double decker buses foreign [Music] if you're not already and you like the video you should like it and consider subscribing now I do think it's important to start this video off by noting that double decker buses aren't exclusive to London or even the UK obviously double decker buses are quite popular in a lot of places around the world from Hong Kong to Singapore videos on both of those cities soon to even places like Berlin and Toronto that being said they are everywhere in London and that's even true on the routes where the capacity of a double decker bus probably isn't even necessary and that really made me think why don't we have more of them especially over here or across the pond well if you ask your average Transit Enthusiast they'll tell you a Litany of reasons that we don't use double deckers more often but as is so often the case I think these are less reasons we don't use double deckers and just the reasons we say we don't use double deckers for one double decker buses are tall which can make them impractical in a lot of places from bus terminals and bus loops to even just driving down highways that might have tunnels or low bridges and you also have issues with things like power lines and foliage that could get in the way of that knife's Upper Deck there's also the very well known or at least well talked about capacity issue with double decker buses which is that if you have a bus that's so large and has few doors well naturally dwell times are going to be longer and this really restricts you and I've even talked about that in the past on my channel of course using articulated buses as an alternative to double decker buses just seems to make sense especially in North America where we have lots of Road space you get more seats but you also get a lot more doors which is nice and it's kind of like a tram but worse I think the thing is with a lot of these reasons they fall into the we assume and aren't really committed to making this thing work and so it doesn't work category but that's bad there are a lot of issues with public transport but I think one of the big ones is that too often we are obsessed with making it unexciting and not focusing on making it so that people's time on public transit is enjoyable and I think a double decker busts along with things like Japan's love of playing music at Railway stations and Switzerland's love of Railways into the mountains are one of those things that people just really enjoy and connect with on a sort of emotional level and the thing that brings me to that conclusion is beyond the fact that double decker buses are kind of famous in London and they're kind of an icon of the city that people always like to think and talk about it and take pictures of is that every time double decker buses get introduced in a North American city it's kind of the same process Transit Agency announces they're doing double decker buses cautiously they're not sure if people are going to love them maybe it's a pilot project they roll them out and then people really enjoy them and they talk about how comfortable they are and the nice views and stuff like that and the Transit Agency tends to continue using them now I do want to address the pleasant ride comfortable joyous thing but let's also address some of the issues that people do bring up with double decker buses now with regard to the height issue people do talk a lot about that but I think it's less of a problem than we often assume sure in lots of cities there are many low bridges and that can truly be a restriction on using double decker buses widely but especially on the highway Express routes which they so often are used for in North America to great success double decker buses are actually fantastic especially because in North America we have a lot of Highways for one but also we tend to build our highways with large vehicles in mind highways and especially giant American interstates are typically built so that giant trucks can roll through carrying giant cargo which indeed is often very tall and so the clearances and stuff don't tend to be a huge issue on most highways of course at the same time if there are certain routes where double decker buses just won't fit in your city you can just use single deck buses and having a mixed Fleet is totally okay London for example has lots of single decker buses alongside its double decker buses but just because you can't use them everywhere doesn't mean you shouldn't use them anywhere and of course if you actually have a lot of double decker buses and their successful and popular that's a little more incentive to raise the bridge next time you replace it or upgrade it so it's worth considering that as well now with regard to capacity and frequency I want to augment what I've said in the past which is that double decker buses probably don't make sense on high frequency routes where you want to have shorter 12 times basically double decker buses have a lot of seats but still probably only as many doors as a regular city bus meaning people are going to have to spend more time getting on and off at each stop well I still think that's generally true I do think there are some nuances here that are worth thinking about while it probably doesn't make sense running double decker buses on a route where buses are packed and operating every five minutes because that's where dwell time really is important on the average bus route in North America or in most places in the world where buses are running every 10 or 15 minutes the dwell time impacts of double decker buses especially when they aren't absolutely packed to the guilds probably isn't that big at the same time if you are running packed buses every five minutes you're probably looking at building a a tram or some other form of rail because it's not very efficient to move so many people across so many small vehicles at the same time with regard to dwell time the way people use double decker buses is fundamentally not the same as regular city buses that you see in a lot of the world people don't tend to crowd the lower deck quite as much as they crowd the single deck of a regular city bus because there's a whole upper deck that they can comfortably sit in and so what you tend to see is people head down just before their stop and get off lest they miss their stuff which most people try to avoid when riding a bus and so the big impacts you might expect on dwell time are a little less of an issue for that reason as well and even with those 12 time impacts if getting buses moving faster through our cities is a huge priority as it should be we can just build some more Q jumps and dedicated lanes and completely offset any negative impact of a more comfortable bus that maybe takes a little longer at each stop perhaps this could incentivize cities like Toronto to consolidate some stops for example because in a lot of cities Toronto being kind of bad on this bus stops are often really really close together something I noticed seemed to be less of a problem in London now I do think there's actually one main legitimate concern about double decker buses in North America but it kind of exposes a broader problem here in North America so let's discuss what that is well we basically only have one option Alexander Dennis who makes buses for Toronto Las Vegas Seattle Vancouver and most places that have double decker buses in North America now since we have one model of bus I think that probably leads to those buses being more expensive but also probably less well designed than they would be otherwise and I don't think that's great but it's a symptom of a bigger problem we have in North America with one of our policies you see we often see Transit as a means to an end but an end that isn't actually Transportation whether it be primarily about a real estate development project or primarily about a street reconfiguration or primarily a way of fueling local non competitive Industries basically in North America you generally have to buy buses from North America there have been a few exceptions but generally that sound A continuing Trend because you have to pay a lot more if you go outside of the North American Market what this means is that we're practically limited to two major bus manufacturers who have less incentive to compete with each other and actually innovate and that's not to say that I don't think we have some nice local buses with pretty decent build quality here in North America it's just that I think we could do so much better but without having overseas bus companies that make in my opinion some really nice and attractive buses competing with our local Industries it's hard to push them to do better it's interesting but when you compare buses to trams or Metro Rolling Stock which we do tend to use designs for from overseas even if we do manufacture it locally I would say that you generally see better or more world-class vehicles and rail systems because again there's more competition for better designs I think this is all probably most obvious in the uncomfortable uninspiring and not super creative designs that we tend to see in North America I don't see a great reason that we shouldn't have a more open bus market and instead of having local companies design and manufacture All Buses we could have some local companies doing this but also some foreign companies which can still make buses locally but can bring in designs from overseas which could all lead to us building and designing better buses even with our domestic companies of course it just generally makes sense to get designs from places like Europe and Asia because these are places where public transit is more intensively used and so naturally they seem like places where you're more likely to see Innovations in public transport vehicle design and I think that's the case that we put Transit behind keeping our local companies afloat seems counterproductive because the price of that means a worse experience for all of our Transit Riders and a worse experience for Transit Riders probably means less people on Transit which probably probably also means less buses to buy in the first place which is generally one of the problems I think we face in North America our policies create Vicious Cycles if you design your transit in an unfriendly way you get less Riders and less Riders get to less Transit it's not a good place to be whether you're a writer or a company producing vehicles for public transit and I think all of this has a real impact Cars part of the metaphor get redesigned every few years meaning that the car industry often inspires or is at least on top of a lot of design Trends and even though we have way way way too many cars I think most people can appreciate that at least some cars have nice designs and having a wide Market of cars that people can choose from probably helps with this and indeed in North America you can buy a European car but you can't really buy a European bus which seems really silly naturally if we admire European companies for their ability to design a Sleek attractive vehicle that's safe and high quality to I don't know drive around diplomats or just drive regular people around the same should definitely be true for buses right now some people might say that having super attractive or fancy buses is bad because governments should be frugal but if people aren't happily and excitingly using one of the modes that provides the most affordable efficient environmentally friendly and Equitable forms of transportation then are we actually being Frugal or efficient in the long game now putting these concerns about manufacturing and Industrial policy aside I also do think we have less double decker buses because we have less double decker buses it's really a self-perpetuating cycle you see when a Transit Agency is buying new buses it probably looks to the existing Fleet it has and says let's buy more of whatever is reliable at least that's what I see in most of the Cities I follow and the issue is if you don't have many or any double decker buses you're probably not going to want to take a risk on buying some and having them potentially break down or not be compatible with different infrastructure in your city or not being able to work with your garages which are not designed for double decker buses because you don't have double decker buses that means in many ways it has to be concerted effort to get a specific kind of vehicle and far too often in North America and in other parts of the world where the fine details of how vehicle design influences whether people enjoy Transit and ride Transit this just isn't that common for us to see Transit agencies using more double decker buses I think we need to present strong arguments in favor of them and I do think those exist as I mentioned before I don't think capacity is nearly as much of an issue with double decker buses as we might imagine and even if double decker buses are a little more expensive than standard buses if they really do attract more ridership or provide a better user experience to Riders then the cost is probably worth it while in this Channel and on Twitter and in other places I'm generally pretty critical of the fact that we spend too much to get too little here in North America I think spending more on a vehicle to provide a legitimately better passenger experience is money well spent that's especially true with buses for a couple of reasons one of the big pluses of double decker buses is that they're really quite comfortable which helps a lot my experience on regular low floor city buses generally isn't great I don't tend to find the seating super comfortable and I find the ride even worse and if you've ever had to stand on a long bus Journey you know just how incredibly unpleasant it is but even when you do get a seat most city buses tend to have kind of awkward layouts and uncomfortable seats often you're facing sideways or jammed up against another seat and that isn't great and I actually think that more so than with Metro trains for example not sitting forward facing is kind of an issue when your ride is constantly swaying back and forth jolting forward and backwards and going over lots of bumps this is where double decker buses really shine because most people can be accommodated sitting facing forward in a regular seat on the top deck and those seats being well configured can have nice amenities like direct air conditioning and plugs and the light which are really nice to have basically while I can train Surf and stand without holding on when I'm on a train the same just isn't true of buses and I think that's part of my double deckers are so comfortable but I think there's a bigger undervalued element to double decker buses and that's just the fact that they're fun and pleasant it's odd to say but I think that even in transit friendly places and by transit supportive people buses are typically looked at is less than when compared to trains and that's enough of an effect that I often hear people arguing that we should shape policy decisions about what Transit we build or where we build Transit based on the fact that people just don't like buses whether that be not running more frequent buses because people probably won't ride more frequent buses because they're buses buses are uncomfortable or that we should build a tram to replace bus lines even if it won't actually improve service in a meaningful way because people just don't like buses but at the same time you rarely see the inverse you rarely see the justification that we should build some Transit because it's Pleasant and enjoyed by Riders and I think that the case here is actually really strong saying that we should buy more double decker buses because people tend to find them comfortable and tend to enjoy riding on them is actually really reasonable especially if we want to get people on the public transit so yeah when I was in London I wasn't just reminded of how good a good train Network can be but I was also reminded how even the little things things like buses can be a real Joy thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: RMTransit

Views: 94,202

Keywords: transit, transportation, rail, railway, railfan, public transit, public transport, public transportation, train, subway, metro, underground, rail transport, urban planning, bus, double decker, london, london bus, double decker bus, go transit

Id: VJ9tZzYGs7Q

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 05 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Severe_Composer_9494]

I agree, double deckers are more comfortable than ordinary busses, plus the view is better.

I also agree with the point that spending more on a good, iconic design, like the London bus, is money well-spent.