To misquote Douglas Adams, it can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, "as pretty as a bus".
Sightline Institute's blog The Daily Score recently noted that people always prefer streetcars and other light rail to buses. They aren't just being subjective, either--history backs them up. In 2001 the Denver Business Journal wrote of new light rail systems being mobbed in Denver, Dallas, Salt Lake City and St. Louis because they were so much more popular than forecasted, saying "In Dallas, ridership on a new rail line was three times greater than ridership on an express bus that used the same route" and quoting government officials who were realizing "How people respond to rail is different than how they respond to bus".
So, why the mysterious preference for light rail? Two words: Better design.
First of all, the user experience of buses are usually lousy. As a commenter to Sightline's article noted, light rail has more easily-visible stops--you can see exactly where the route goes because there are rails in the street, and tickets are often (though not always) bought in advance, often from machines that actually give change and take debit or credit cards. As a Seattle Times columnist noted while exploring Portland's light rail system, "The longest any of my trains spent stopped at a station was 25 seconds -- even when 75 rush-hour commuters tried to board a crowded train at once. I've waited much longer for a single rider to get on a Seattle bus, fumbling for change or arguing with the driver." Curitiba's bus system has solved this problem by making its stations and ticketing work like rail systems, and is famously effective because of it--70% of the city rides the bus. Other advantages light rail vehicles have are that they are generally larger and more spacious, and have a much smoother ride, because smooth tracks eliminate road vibration. This lack of vibration, combined with the fact that streetcars are almost always electric, means they are quiet. Being electric, they also don't belch diesel fumes on bysanders waiting at the stations. (To be fair, many city's buses are electric. On the other hand, the overhead cables for those systems are unsightly and those buses sometimes get tripped off the cables, causing a delay while the driver gets out and fixes it before resuming the trip.)
Secondly, the aesthetics of city buses are always terrible, with the exception of British double-deckers and a few European models. Buses are one of the few objects that look better with advertising on them. They are boxy and clumsy-looking on the outside, and the inside is usually a clutter of rails, posts, seats, warning stickers, cables and advertising. They appear to not to be designed so much as concatenated by soulless wretches in committee. Rarely is there any clarity or harmony to the design, and the utilitarian straight lines are those of a hospital gurney, not of a stylish automobile. School buses are better, because they are not so cluttered, but none approaches the sleek kick that a C-Type Jaguar has. Nor do they approach the entertainment value that a Japanese "dekotora" truck has. (That might have a more limited appeal, but it would at least make people think differently about buses!)
The best improvements would come with system infrastructure to improve the usability, but that is expensive. Bus redesign, however, does not have to be. Buses could easily be made prettier and quieter with miniscule budgetary impacts. Already the cost of vehicles is dwarfed by the cost of the operators driving them. For instance, the salary of a bus driver in San Francisco is $27 / hr (about $56,000 / year). A new diesel bus costs between $250,000 and $500,000 and lasts 12 years or more, averaging out to between $21,000 and $41,000 per year (not including maintenance, which aesthetic redesign should not increase). Most of the expense in building a bus is related to safety equipment and the drive train, and are unrelated to the aesthetics of the shell. Significant improvements could be made at no additional cost, and vast improvements could be made for $5,000 - $10,000, which is still practically a rounding error in the price tag.
One simple idea: no straight lines. Have everything in the bus (seats, bars, body, windows) be curved. Second idea: eliminate the clutter. Integrate informational signs / warnings in the visual elements of the bus interior, make the cable pulls pretty or replace them with buttons, eliminate the advertising posts inside the bus (if you need ad revenue, use the outside of the bus.) Third idea: decent sound-damping inside (and more acoustic damping between the inside and outside). This would even make people on the bus quieter and better-behaved, as talking would stick out more. Fourth idea: make bus stops pleasant places to spend time, more like park benches than sidewalks. Seattle does a good job of this, with art (often local-community-made art) in nearly all stops. Fifth idea: enable payment by card-swipe, be it debit or credit or special prepaid bus-card (like San Francisco's BART tickets), to eliminate the fumbling for change / begging for change from other bus-goers / arguments with the driver. I could go on, but the ideas increase in cost as they become more system-oriented.
One of the key principles of green design is persuasion. You cannot criticize people out of their cars, you can only entice them out with a better option. If buses were beautiful and pleasant to ride, they would be far more persuasive than they are now.
image credits: City of Sioux Falls SD, Classic Driver, and Pink Tentacle
