Curious what would be a good bus system? I've only ever lived in the US and can honestly say I've never seen one.

The Berlin one… mostly doesn't suck? At least in zone B[0]. I don't trust them to not get in traffic jams in zone A.

They have USB chargers and WiFi on half of them.

[0] Zone A: core; Zone C: the part of the commuter belt outside the city limits; Zone B: between A and B — https://sbahn.berlin/en/tickets/the-vbb-fare-explained/fare-...

Plenty of bus stops, special bus lanes, modern buses, air-conditioning, clean environment, frequent on-time schedules, and plenty of routes to take you to/from all major city areas and suburbs. No crazies and violent crime either.

Of course the city also needs to support walking the final 300-2000 ft to your destination after the bus stop. If most of your stops are some BS office or industrial zone, with roads build for cars, no shade, no shops, and nothing to do around, it's pointless.

I use the busses in Boston all the time, and have been for over 20 years. Way back when it was a pain but ever since bus tracking apps showed up on the scene about 15 years ago it's been a smooth experience.

I live in Boston and would still use the T buses as an example of bus service as an afterthought. The buses are loud, uncomfortable, bus stops frequently have no shelter and are on busy roads with no buffer from 2-3 lanes of traffic, and there are almost no dedicated bus lanes so the bus gets stuck in the same traffic as all the cars.

In San Francisco Muni shelters are largely all the same whether for street level bus or tram. They're all equally awful because they were designed to be inhospitable in an attempt to prevent people from sleeping at them.

https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/styles/teaser-col-...

Buenos Aires has about 200 bus lines with fairly high frequency (2-7 minutes during peak riding times) and almost all lines have overnight service, albeit at low frequency. Bus rides are highly subsidized. Congestion can get pretty bad during the day but you can get anywhere you want within the city.

I was pleasantly surprised at San Antonio's bus system. They were everywhere downtown, frequent, and even had lines that go about an hour out of the city.

I was only there as a tourist though, I don't know how well they'd be for day-to-day life and cross-town trips.

In other cities where I have used buses regularly, I've found them to suffer a bit from limited routes, transfers, it taking 2 hours to get anywhere, and then buses stop running too early at night.

Buses could be ok, but the same attitude of compromise that swapped steel wheels for rubber also generates--

+ hard plastic seats

+ inadequate climate control

+ poor maintenance leading to excessive nose and exhaust fumes in the cabin

+ extremely poor personal space

+ seating configurations with poor leg room

+ convoluted routes and schedules, degrading point-to-point travel

+ the driving can be uneven, because they aren't much better off than riders

Light rail is better because the folks who design and operate the systems aren't bent on bargaining away the entire rider experience.

  hard plastic seats

https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/23/05/56/21781404/4/1200x0.jpg

  inadequate climate control

I've not spent enough time on the current crop of Muni streetcars, but the old ones were horrific. They had fixed windows and really unreliable A/C. Perhaps the one saving grace of the first generation ones is that you could open the windows. BART's much worse, but the drivers will typically take note of cars without A/C because it can be indicative of bigger electrical problems.

  poor maintenance leading to excessive nose and exhaust fumes in the cabin

Poor maintenance is poor maintenance. For a while Muni drivers would disable the door interlocks because the doors were so unreliable. Used to be inattentive drivers would take off without checking to see if anyone was trying to board. Ask me how I know…

  extremely poor personal space
  seating configurations with poor leg room

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

Check out that seat right by the articulation joint. Or the seats next to the stairs

  convoluted routes and schedules, degrading point-to-point travel

This is a system not mode issue. BART's designed for point to point travel (mostly out of hubris really) and Muni is designed around multi-modal transfers.

  the driving can be uneven, because they aren't much better off than riders

Then you've really not seen just how bad auto train control can be. When manually operated I'd run into drivers who couldn't remember how long the train was and accelerate out of a 90 degree turn and knock people at the back out of their seats. In the early 00s Muni managed to actually derail real dramatically for the same reason.

Light rail can be better but not always. Certainly the diesel vs electric issue can come into play (although you can make some truly awful trolley coaches too).

There is another reason for building rail systems. The routes are fixed. It is easy to change a bus route by moving the stops around and issuing a new map. It is, as you say, expensive to change a rail route.

Because rail routes are fixed, that means that developers can count on their longevity, and therefore they develop real estate to match it. A rail line can greatly gentrify the neighborhoods it runs through, given a decade or two to get started. This is a big reason why many neighborhoods will protest and block and vote against any rail lines being built near them, because they know it will start the timer on rising property values, rising rents, new neighbors, and the destruction of low-income and affordable housing.

That flexibility is also a reason for building bus routes: they can be re-routed as needed due to construction or changing rider patterns, buses can be replaced (improved) without having to retrofit the entire system, new ones can be added where needed, old ones can be removed where not, etc.

Central planners might like the idea that they can choose which neighborhoods will succeed, but count me among those who think they can F themselves.

Buses work. They're cheaper than every kind of rail. They're more flexible. But planners and meddlers want control.