Shuttle buses are well and good but few if any of the cities around LA have them. They also don't go deep into sprawling housing tracks so there's still issues of first/last mile of a commute. Where they're available they're not available in an effective volume.

I'm not saying LA should be this way, it just is this way. The suburban sprawl makes most of Southern California a shit show for public transit. Cities with effective public transit tend to have higher population densities at least more concentrated commercial areas. In SoCal (tired of typing it out) places where jobs are located are distributed all throughout the sprawl. There's no real "downtown" where all the jobs are located.

It also doesn't help that due to earthquake and fire codes it's rare to see mixed zoning in much of California. So few neighborhoods with ground floor commercial/retail and upper floor residential zoning.

It costs about $100/hour to run a bus. A small bus only saves a small amount from that cost. If there is any possibly of filling the small bus you should always run the larger bus. If money is not infinite you will prefer to run a larger bus less often (though the more often you run the bus the better up to 5 minute headway)

Those are retail prices for me renting a shuttle bus, not wholesale fleet-wide ones.

In Vancouver, the cost to operate regular buses, per revenue-hour (time the bus is carrying passengers) is ~$120/hour. The cost of operating shuttle buses is ~$70/hour. [1] This is because smaller buses use less gas, are cheaper to maintain, and have better labour utilization (Time the driver spends on the clock driving passengers, versus time the driver spends on the clock waiting around, switching routes, etc.)

And this is operational costs. Capital costs are another huge factor, that's not accounted for in the operational numbers. It costs a lot more to order an 80-passenger bus (And even more so for a trolley), then it does a 24-passenger one.

Also, this is only anecdotal, from being a rider, but I'm pretty sure that shuttle-buses both perform better in congested environments, and cause less traffic congestion (As they have a much better power-to-weight ratio, better acceleration and breaking, a smaller turning radius...)

[1] https://www.translink.ca/-/media/Documents/about_translink/g...

$120 canadian is about $90 US, so Vancouver is doing cheap by US standards. The tiny city I live in reports $102/hour, but I think this is both operative costs and amortized capital costs. You can see the numbers in the reports at https://www.transit.dot.gov/ntd (if you can find them).

The capital costs of the bus isn't that much different over the lifespan of a bus. If you need a large bus at all, then it is cheaper to buy one large bus than both the large and small. Small buses cost less mostly because the drivers don't have to be as well trained - I'm not sure I want that difference.

In Vancouver, drivers are not interchangeable between the two buses, so they don't get trained on both.

This worked because shuttlebus service was slowly ramped up year over year.

The small buses are solely used for last mile suburban routes, the large buses for anything else.