Indeed. Buses are held up as a solution to traffic, but they are terrible things to share the road with as either a driver or cyclist. I wonder how many people have to be on the bus for that many cars to be as annoying as a single bus.
I've been cycling as a primary mode of travel for about 10 years now in LA and in the Mountain View area. So pretty broad depth of experience from bat shit insane metro traffic to the bucolic in comparison suburban commuting.
Car drivers are orders of magnitude more of a threat to my safety than buses. Buses are far more predictable and tend to change their vector of travel more gradually when they do change. Also, the drivers tend to be much more alert and aware of their surroundings.
Also, in general and particularly during commuter traffic, they really aren't that much slower aside from the stops.
I've also never, ever had a bus driver intentionally try to harm me in a bus (like trying to 'muscle' me off the road). This has happened on multiple occasions with car drivers.
edit
I'd also like to mention I love the google cars. They're just so predictable and courteous. And in general, they just follow the rules.
For example, at a stop sign that a human driver reaches first. They have the right of way, but they want to be polite so they'll try to wave a cyclist on...then start to go...then stop and wave....then start to go. There's nothing more dangerous to a cyclist then a driver not following the rules and behaving erratically.
Google car? Stops. Waits. Goes. No fuss. I have seen the older models get "stuck" and wait longer than normal. Though usually this is when other drivers refuse to go before the google car.
Here in Montreal, car drivers seem much more willing and eager to kill me (cyclist) than bus drivers. What makes car drivers so willing to casually endanger a human life I will never know. That they get away with all that reckless behavior can be infuriating.
From experience cycling in london cars don't belch as much nasty crap into the atmosphere and its the big vehicles buses and lorries lorries turning into you that are the real killers.
Busses here have been natural gas for a while.[1] We don't have many lorries here, mostly very large 18 wheelers and local deliver trucks...I count the delivery trucks amongst the regular car drivers. I wouldn't say they're more dangerous, though not less.
Oooh fun thought exercise - My guess is about four cars equal the annoyance of a bus over the span of a year. Four randomized drivers will on average be slightly more annoying than an average year for one bus.
Taking into account:
1) Number of drivers removed from the roads by average annual bus use
2) Size of the vehicles
3) Random acts of annoyance
4) Dangers posed by each
To confess my bias - I'm a huge fan of mass transit and a bike commuter who touches his car maybe once a week, but curious how else one might model this.
By the bus's frequent stops and lumbering acceleration, I'd estimate it cuts the average speed behind it by at least half. Unclear how far down the road this effect travels, but a significant distance. I've also yet to see a bus stop that doesn't obstruct the bike lane, so apply this effect to bikes as well.
Sometimes (though rarely) the bus stop is such that the bus can pull out of the traffic lane and become less of an obstruction, but even then, right turns are delayed significantly.
I don't mind this when I see a full bus, because I know that many private cars would slow down traffic at least as much. But damn is it annoying when the bus has 3 people on it (as is usually the case in my non-transit-oriented city).
> I've also yet to see a bus stop that doesn't obstruct the bike lane
They're fairly common in a lot of places, though only recently being built in the US, because they typically go together with having protected bike lanes, which were almost unknown in the US until recently. Here's a fairly typical example from Copenhagen (you can see that the bike lane passes behind the bus stop): https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6757297,12.5451953,3a,15y,46...
It's not usually an issue, though it does require having norms that both pedestrians and bicyclists follow. In Denmark, at least, there are two kinds of bus stops. At ones like this one, which have an island between the bike lane and road, passengers cross the bike lane whenever there's a break in bike traffic, and wait on the island for the bus. Then actual bus loading/unloading is directly to the island and doesn't cross the bike lane. In other cases, where there isn't a waiting island, passengers wait on the sidewalk and do have to cross the bike lane to board/unboard. In those cases, there's a zebra stripe painted on the bike lane in the area where passengers are supposed to cross, and bicyclists must stop before the stripe whenever a bus is present with open doors. So in those cases a bus stopping does interrupt bicycle traffic, though not by the bus actually entering the bike lane. That looks like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6754034,12.5457476,3a,75y,16...
> Sometimes (though rarely) the bus stop is such that the bus can pull out of the traffic lane and become less of an obstruction
It is actually a deliberate policy in many cases not to have the buses pull out of the traffic lane, because it is hard for the buses to get back into traffic since cars do not want to let them in, resulting in slower bus journeys.
I beg to differ. It doesn't remove that many cars, really. How often do you see a bus pass by? Every 20 minutes or so? Count how many cars pass by in the same amount of time, and some of them carry multiple passengers. (I have no problems with buses here in Europe at all, just sayin'..)
blackhaz didn't say it, but is probably thinking there are hundreds of cars per bus. My mental image was a bus with 10-20 people, vs. 500 cars (in that 20 minutes)
One could argue every passenger on a bus saves some fraction of a car trip. Even if the total number of car trips saved is a much smaller number than the total number of cars, there's a 'breakeven' point above which the pain of the buses is less than the pain of the bus passengers in cars. I bet in most cities, we've hit that breakeven point, regardless of bus behavior.
<wild speculation>
I bet that number is about 6 passengers per bus, excluding environmental concerns.
</wild speculation>
I think a good way to estimate it is to get a graph where you have average number of people in a bus at a time, then compare that to the average amount of people that are in a car at a time.
people_in_bus/average_#_people_in_cars = #_of_cars_removed_at_this_moment . Of course the model can be made significantly more complicated, but it's a good starting point.
most of the buses I see round here are full of either school kids or elderly folks. I suspect the annoyance they would cause by becoming drivers might be considerably more than they do as bus passengers.
