Seats on busses are great during low demand periods but they seem like a massive waste of space when busses are running at capacity. If bus seats were designed in a way where they could be easily removable, busses could instead run in special “high capacity” mode during peak times. This would mean you could run fewer busses down a route, saving on capital costs and driver costs.
Are there any transit systems in the world that operate this way? Is there a reason why this idea wouldn’t work?
I drive a public transportation bus;
What you are making reference to is a cattle car!
Standee"s are very much an unsafe practice and I have packed them in like that on occasion I did not like doing so.
Great! Just what I would like to see on my local bus.
Seriously…I suspect that it would be far more labor-intensive to remove the seats and then re-install them than it would be to just run another couple of buses. And where do they put all the seats for those few hours each day? Seems more practical to just go all the way and remove all the seats (save a few for the elderly and infirm). Not that I’m OK with that…
Standing passengers can much more easily fall over when the bus accelerates and decelerates (which they tend to do a LOT, at least once per stop serviced). Also, most passengers dislike standing.When you’re standing, it’s hard to use your phone (i.e. text, play games, etc.), read, or do any of the other things riders do to pass the time while somebody else worries about the driving.
I have encountered those seats that fold down on subways, but can’t recall if I’ve seen them on busses. There are supposed to be bars, handles, and straps to hang on to if you have to stand.
Not an original idea: New York MTA to Remove Seats on Some Subway Cars
The buses in Chicago all have a few seats that can fold up against the wall. The purpose is to accommodate wheelchair passengers. But it would be easy enough to fold them up just to sardine in more standing passengers. And they could easily hinge just about all of the seats if they wanted to.
An all-standing bus wouldn’t bother me. There are always plenty of straps, and bus traffic in the city never goes very fast.
Standing passengers are not a good idea but some of our city buses would fold up the handicapped seats at peak hours when they were not needed. Rarely; but I did see it done more than once.
Airport terminal buses (the ones that ferry people between a plane and the terminal building) are mostly for standing passengers. I was on one last week that had only 12 seats.
Japan Rail used to have the 6-door train cars. Those train cars had 6 doors on each side rather than the normal 4, and the seats were retractable. The seats were all retracted during rush hours. (4:15 into that video, you can see the moment the rush hour officially ends, and the retracted seats become unlocked and available for use.)
They have since been taken out of service, partly because construction of new rail lines have eased congestion, and partly because they started installing safety barriers on platforms (the barrier doors don’t line up with the doors on those 6-door cars).
Consider that if you have a fleet of busses with removable seats, what do you do with the seats when they aren’t in the bus?
Everything has to be somewhere. It’s like a fundamental law of the universe, or something.
Also consider the time it would take to remove and reinstall the seats.
They could fold up, like the JR train I posted a link to.
Or they could retract into the ceiling. I believe these (Keihan 5000 class trains) are still in use.
I have not found any mention of buses with retractable seats, however.
I’ve looked at a lot of buses around the world, but never seen fold-down seats.
I mean, where do they put all the extra busses? The idea is, let’s say you have a route that normally takes 10 busses during non-peak times but gets 3x as busy during peak times. With non-convertible busses, you would have to buy 30 busses to handle that route, with 66% of the busses sitting idle for 80% of the day.
Instead, assume that a convertible bus can fit 2.5X more passengers in cattle car mode, now you only need 12 busses to handle that route. Only 2 busses get put out of commission during non-peak times and you save on the storage space of 18 busses which is more than enough room to store 12 busses worth of seats.
What’s more, it makes staffing significantly easier. Before, you needed to find 20 people willing to work only from the hours of 7 - 10 and 4 - 7. Are you going to pay them to sit around idle for 6 hours or are they going to have to scramble to find a second job that fits their schedule? With the convertible busses, even if you hire a team of 4 people to convert 12 busses each morning and evening, you’re still at a lower staffing cost.
That doesn’t add up. So you add the extra step of going back to the depot to have seats removed/replaced, and every bus is going to have to do it, ideally at pretty much the same time.
So you take the seats out before morning rush, then put them back in after, take them out again before evening, and replace them after? Except the two that don’t get used?
Assuming it takes about 15 minutes per bus, which is pretty optimistic with a team of 4 people removing or replacing every seat, some busses are going to be seatless for over 2.5 hours after morning rush, and some are going to be for 2.5 hours before evening.
Remember your method of seat attachment is going to have to be very secure and reliable, and something that can’t be achieved by passengers while the bus is in use. It’s not going to be an instant job to switch. 40 seats is about standard for a small bus here (big double deckers are 70+), so that would be under 30 seconds a seat, to get them detached and out.
If the evening rush finishes at 7 pm, you’re not going to have the last seat fitted til the busses are almost onto night time schedule, which probably can be covered by fewer than half the day busses. If you’re defining 7-10 as morning rush and 4-7 as evening, there’d only be about an hour in the middle of the day when all busses had seats, plus overnight, when most of the busses are back in the depot anyway.
Then you re-fit the seats for the day, after rush hour? So every bus is going to have to leave the route, drive back to the depot, get their seats fitted, and head back to their route. That’s going to add a lot of complicated scheduling, sending other busses to cover, or it’ll leave big gaps in the timetable. How far from the depot are the busses going to be? I don’t know about your area, but here, the furthest can be about 45 minutes away even at the closest point of the route. You can’t leave a 1.5 hour+ gap. It’d take several busses just to cover all the gaps, if there was only one it’d add even more time for the ‘cover’ bus to make it to the next switch point (during which time your seat switching team is sitting idle), and unless every bus is the end of its route, you’d have to get all the passengers to change busses, which would generate lots of complaints and add even more time.
If you don’t refit the seats for the day, you’d only have seats at night, when there are generally even fewer customers. What’s the point?
If you’re going to try and cram as many people in as possible by removing all the seats, unless you can do some kind of low-cost automated retractable seat, there’s no benefit whatsoever in putting the seats back.
It seems likely to me that organisations that run a lot of buses (TFL for example) will employ clever people with sophisticated algorithms to calculate the best balance of capacity (rush hour and normal) cost, safety and comfort.
There may well be over 100 people on a double-decker bus
UK bus companies often get funding to run unprofitable routes, the frequency of which are then dictated by the council, so TFL maybe aren’t the best example for efficiency. That is more of a thing in rural areas, admittedly, I’d expect London routes are more profitable in general.
And Shalmanese, your example of ‘routes that take 10 busses, but get 3 x as busy at peak hours so you need 30’ really doesn’t tend to be how it works; companies may put on a few extra at peak times, but in general, they run roughly the same number of busses on the route (except at night, when they may stop entirely), but each busses will only have 1/3 of the passengers.
They’re not parking up the busses during the middle of the day, and telling the drivers to go twiddle their thumbs for a few hours, they’re just running the busses at way under capacity. If you run a bus every 20 minutes, and get 10 passengers per bus, you can’t expect to cut that down to every 60 minutes and get 30 passengers per bus, because people only get the bus if it’s the most convenient option for them. Also, routes can be loooong, and it might make no sense at all to recall drivers.
The one which goes past my old house is 3 hours each way, but it does hit capacity at certain times of the day, on some parts of the route. I’ve also been the only person on it aside from the driver for over an hour, more than once.
By the way, highway buses in Japan typically have foldout seats, so they do work on buses. I remember using them on school trips. But these are for using the aisle space for additional seating. I’ve never seen a bus where seats are folded to make room for additional standing room.
Many of the buses in Montreal (all the “bendy buses” have fold-down seats where there is space for wheel chairs.
I recently read a proposal to remove the seats from the NYC subways. I don’t think it got much traction.
It would be a safety hazard if the seats weren’t reinstalled correctly and they came loose in a crash.