Toronto buses have a similar set up. Now, Toronto has done one thing that I don’t if it is being done elsewhere. Subway rolling stock is being upgraded. The new subway trains are as long as the old ones but are not made up of separate cars but rather one long train. It adds something like an additional 15-20% of interior space.
It’s called “open gangway” trains and it’s becoming common in new generation transit cars around the world. The advantages are obvious.
Imagine all the seats in a column are attached to a long rail which can be slid out of the back of the bus all at once. Or imagine the roof of the bus opens so that a mechanized crane can come in and pluck all the seats out at once. Or imagine seats that can be folded up against the side of a bus. It’s not hard to imagine various designs that can take all the seats out of a bus in just a few minutes.
Interesting. I wonder if these trains have more trouble handling curves and changes in gradient than the traditional coupled rail cars setup?
Back to the OP, the DC Circulator buses have some foldable seats. They get really crowded and the extra space helps.
Bear in mind that even if you might want ten times the number of busses at rush hour, you can’t actually run ten times the busses because of traffic conditions. TFL in London do run more busses at rush hour on most routes, but it’s a much smaller increase than that. And the busses that run “under capacity” are more useful than you’d think. If you just stopped running those busses off-peak, then peak-time busses would get even more full.
In between, some of the busses are taken aside to be cleaned, refuelled (in London they can’t use regular petrol stations - they’re just too big) have routine maintenance and let their engines cool - you can’t actually run busses continually, so them having a “break” isn’t a bad thing (newer buses do manage to idle at bus stops without actually stopping running, so presumably can work for longer without a break, but still not forever).
And, importantly, in places that don’t have busses run through the night, where do you think the busses go? Even in London there are far fewer nightbusses than day busses and the idle busses don’t squidge down and store in a pocket.
Also having no seats at all would be terrible for people with disabilities who don’t use wheelchairs, elderly people, or people travelling with young kids, and they wouldn’t be great for anyone on the longer routes. Even if you decided to keep, say, four chairs, that could mean extremely long waits for those who need them and it’s actually quite a sizeable chunk of the bus-using population.
No, they’re flexible bellows like those used on articulated buses. Universal joints above and below the bellows keep the cars together while permitting movement. Instead of wheels on both ends of the cars, the wheels are beneath the car-to-car connection. It’s a technique that’s been used since the 1920s on regular trains. However, it makes it difficult to run shorter trains during off hours.
Taken to an extreme, I’d fly standing for a 2-3 hour flight if it meant a 50-75% drop in ticket price. A rough landing might get tricky.
There are vertical seat designs intended for passenger planes, but they’re relatively new and there are regulatory hurdles in some places.
They do in Milwaukee to accomodate wheelchairs
The OP was asking about removing all the chairs, not folding a few of them. Sorry to pick on you - you’re just the latest to mention that busses often have a few folding seats, but that doesn’t actually back up the OP’s idea.
The OP did not specify all seats to be removable. It just said “seats that can be removed during peak hours” to allow a “high capacity” mode.
I think in any country has such disregard for disabled & elderly passengers as to allow buses with no seats at all, they wouldn’t bother reconfiguring the buses. They’d just run the buses with no seats all the time, or allow people to hang off the edge of the bus or ride on the roof.
Very unsafe.
Speaking of articulated buses, the ones around here only have slightly more seating than normal-length buses. Their advantage over the normal buses comes only in rush hour when they operate in cattle-car mode, because they have a lot more standing space.
You do seem to see a greater proportion of the articulated ones during rush hour, too. Most of our bus lines run all day, but with a lot more service during rush hour (say, every ten minutes during rush hour, every hour at other times).
The OP is Shalmanese - he’s definitely talking about removing all the seats:
While it doesn’t apply to buses, there is an associated striking difference in social norms concerning the Tube in London and the Paris Metro (and the RER).
Both systems often have fold-down seats next to the doors in the middle of carriages. In Paris the norm is that nobody uses these seats when the train is crowded, because it’s slightly more efficient for people to stand in those spaces (as per the OP). Outside of rush hour, feel free to sit.
In London, there’s no such norm. Even on the busiest, most crammed trains, people will sit on those seats. Indeed, someone occupying that space without sitting down will be regarded by the commuters in the rest of the carriage, however packed in, as a weirdo. For what’s regarded as the purpose of such seats is to create space for wheelchairs and prams as necessary. People will make way for those.