Trains just have so much higher capacity than roads. A single lane of highway traffic can handle about 2,000 cars per hour, and that of a surface street probably more like 1,000 cars per hour, while a track of railway can handle 24-30 trains per hour. Trains themselves can carry 1000-1500 people (albeit not comfortably on the high-end), which means you're looking at 25k-45k people/hour/lane on a train. You can't compete with that by road unless you have tons of buses converging on a dedicated busway for a trunk commute (something like this happens in the Lincoln Tunnel).

Yes, let’s have more deadly, congestion-inducing, loud and smog-producing private buses filling up our streets, rather than making a cheap, electrified mass transit system better.

The Queens to Chinatown bus fills a gap in services from Flushing to Chinatown. If that bus is really transporting multiple subway trains worth of people each day, that in my mind means we ought to build better mass transit between those two places. Not that we should cannibalize our working people-moving infrastructure for something worse.

> Not that we should cannibalize our working (!) people-moving infrastructure for something worse.

> Cannibalize

What's wrong with cannibalizing a system that's fundamentally broken?

Subway isn't fundamentally broken; mis-aligned management incentives are...