12-08-2020, 09:57 AM
(12-08-2020, 01:09 AM)danbrotherston Wrote:(12-07-2020, 11:48 PM)tomh009 Wrote: Certainly not a magic bullet, but if you save $50K+ per bus on acquisition costs, and 10%+ on operation costs, why wouldn't you use it for routes that never go above 20 pax? I really don't see the downside.
Again, operational costs....and if your goal is to grow your system, then you hope never to have routes that don't go above 20 passengers.
Ultimately, I'm not opposed to the idea. I just don't think think it achieves much. I don't see that it can make a meaningful improvement in our transit...to me it's nothing more than a minor (and somewhat brittle) cost optimization.
And honestly, this isn't the first time I've heard excitement around the idea...the microtransit/smaller vehicle theme comes up pretty often.
My assumption here is that the operation costs are lower. If they were higher, I don't see any reason why GRT would have ordered these.
These are not microtransit -- it's more like a 2/3-scale bus -- and I don't see any huge excitement about this. But if it's a more efficient way to use our transit budget, and allows the savings to be spent elsewhere, I don't see the reason for the grumbling.