Buscar: 

The demand for drivers

Heavy vehicles for public transport have only one advantage over small vehicles, they take most advantage of the driver’s work. A bus with 60 seats needs one person to drive it, whereas three buses with 20 seats need three drivers. This is an unquestionable advantage, but it is necessary to weigh it up against its disadvantages, which we will now study.

Let’s compare the service that a certain company with the two options can provide: A bus with 60 seats or three buses with 20 seats.
 - If the task is to cover a regular line and the larger bus does it hourly, the three small ones can pass every 20 minutes. Small vehicles can offer more frequency than larger ones. Would the company not gain clients from its competition with private cars, taxis and other bus or train public transport lines with the second option?
- If the task is to offer a semi-regular service, such as the collection of students within a certain zone to take them to school, or workers to an industrial area on a daily basis, the three combined small buses present several advantages: They divide the zone covered by the large bus into three parts, which means less stopping, less distance travelled and, importantly, less time spent travelling for its users. Furthermore, small buses have more penetrative capability and circulate more freely in the countryside, on roads with heavy traffic or in narrow streets.
- If the task is to cover diverse lines in a certain zone, such as a city and its suburbs, the three small buses adapt better to future trends, because they can branch out the lines. A big bus goes from A to B, whereas three 20-seater buses can combine A with B, C and D. This greater flexibility would avoid many transfers and a lot of time lost for travellers. It is also necessary to take into account the speed that a smaller number of stops brings.
- If the task is to offer free trips to groups, be they touristic, for work or any other kind of trip, the three 20-seater buses can simultaneously satisfy three groups of 20 people or less; or a group of less than 40 people and another one of less than 20. They adapt better to small groups, without causing any disadvantage to the larger ones. They also adapt better to multiple origins and destinations. Let’s consider the case of 60 people from a cultural association in Madrid who together wish visit the city of Teruel. The common factor is that the 60 people live in the city of Madrid and its environs although at different addresses. With three 20-seater buses, while one collects those travellers from the south, another one does it with those from the centre and another one does it with those from the north. The same can happen on the return journey. There is even the possibility that, with an opportune address list, each bus gathers its passengers at the door of his/her home without a great delay. This operation would take too much time for a bus for three times as many people in a zone that was three times as large.

Usually, within the diverse situations presented here, the three 20-seater buses offer the company the possibility of avoiding many empty seats. When the task is to take students to school, buses with 60 seats that collect a total of 30 children are often seen. There are 30 useless seats. With the small buses option, one of them will not be necessary, so that 20 seats in that journey will not be wasteful.

We can summarize in one sentence the set of advantages that small public service vehicles offer over heavy ones: Attention to each traveller is more customized, which as far as proximity to the door of origin and destination and frequency and speed are concerned may benefit him/her.

There are many pertinent comparisons to show the value of the subject. For example, a school with a teacher for every 60 students, in comparison with another where there is a teacher for every 20 students. Evidently, the education of this latter school will be of much greater quality, because the attention given to each student is more customized. The same happens if we contrast a hospital where each doctor takes care of 60 patients with another one where each doctor takes care of 20 patients.

In developed societies there is no school where a teacher instructs 60 children. That is an unequivocal sign of backwardness. As far as medical services are concerned, the ratio of the number of doctors to the number of patients grows as the wealth of the country increases.

Why does a society which can gradually increase the proportion of teachers, doctors and so many other qualified professionals, over several decades not progress towards a better ratio of drivers to passengers? Must we await the implantation of automatic guidance to advance towards a size reduction in public transport vehicles, and therefore towards greater frequency, rapidity and proximity to the users’ door of origin and destination?

The growth in use of mobile phones and personal computers connected to the worldwide web makes great achievements in the area of the combination of trips feasible, and such a combination requires, to secure a suitable balance between service and the price of public trips, that vehicle size falls to a 20 seat maximum.

       

The public transport of the near future has great opportunities to enlarge its market mainly at the expense of private cars, but also of taxis. For the price of an urban bus journey, or a little greater, users will be collected by a minibus at their door of origin and taken to their destination. But not in the way  that taxis currently do it. The great difference in price will be caused by the fact that 15-20-seater minibuses will not do complete journeys for one, two, three or four clients who travel together, but will gather and lower travellers that, without knowing each other, have arranged their trips with the transport company, by telephone or the Internet. Each driver will have a computer screen connected to a central computer. The display will instruct him about where he must pause for each traveller, according to an intelligent route devised by a computer program.

During the next few decades, while the diverse technologies able to guarantee a safe automatic guidance do not prevail, the demand for public-transport drivers in developed countries will carry on growing as will that for teachers and doctors.

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