Maybe it's different where you live, but 95% of the buses I see driving around here are completely empty.

No contest when the bus is full, but the overall efficiency (/"greeness") of the system is much less clear considering: buses are rarely full, most buses are diesel, heavy buses tear up the pavement on their routes (especially near stops), and buses don't take riders directly to/from their destinations.

Different 30 people in the US. I’d drop my car if Waymo was around and financially made sense. You’ll never catch me wasting my time on a bus though. We’ll never even be close to Europe or elsewhere wrt where public transit was even decades ago in those places.

People here only ride the bus when there’s no other option for them.

Waymo could make a bus too anyway, especially after they’ve been in an area a while and have data about where they’d have the most impact. Internet at large would probably decry it as enshittification.

An average bus load in the US is around 18 people. So if you just compute the raw bus emissions, then an electric bus is maybe about 2x more efficient than personal EVs.

But wait, there's so much more!

A single bus/subway ride costs about $20, which is a surprisingly consistent figure for various US cities. In NYC it's $17, for example. I'm talking about the _true_ cost, as in: "yearly operational budget divided by the number of trips". And most of this cost comes from 3-4 drivers that every bus needs, not from the hardware itself.

Price is a pretty reliable proxy for CO2 emissions for general market goods and services. And with these kinds of numbers, personal cars are competitive. Even if we factor in subsidized road maintenance cost ( https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... ).

If we now add mild carpooling, so that a single robotaxi drives 2-3 people, then classic transit just dies. It's like comparing horse-drawn carriages with steam trains.