How Car Traffic Disrupts Bus Services and Affects Reliability

Traffic from cars can affect the quality of city bus services. Potential riders reject the bus as a travel option because services can be unreliable. By choosing to travel by car instead they make the problem worse for people who persevere with the healthier and more climate friendly option.

Issues arise because buses share roads with cars. This tends to reduce the efficiency of bus travel unless given a dedicated corridor. Road congestion leads to frequent stops and starts, which can cause delays and make bus travel less reliable. During rush hours the impact of all this stop, start and congestion is a timetable which is shot to pieces. Buses trapped in traffic tend to end up nose to tail, leading to the phenomenon of there being none for half an hour and then three arriving at once. 

Cities where bus lanes are used to reduce the impact of cars see both better rider numbers and less congestion. Faster, more reliable bus services are inevitably more popular than those which offer poor service.

However, fixing bus services isn’t about creating a few bus lanes with a bit of paint and calling it a day. Buses lanes need to be planned in a way which allows routes to be run without ever being at the mercy of cars. That means end to end bus lanes that don’t disappear at awkward pinch points. It means ensuring buses have priority at junctions and it means routes which join up with each other and make logical connections to rail and ferry services.

Most of all though, it means deprioritising cars. Reducing the space available to them on all roads and closing areas of cities to the car completely. 

Drivers complain about traffic without ever realising that they are, in fact, the traffic. Whilst they are allowed to continue to impact not only car drivers but also users of public transport, there is little prospect of things getting better.