Pipe sizes are 3d, so as you go from 1" to 2" to 3" to 4" the amount of throughput skyrockets.
Roads are flat, not stacked, so you're just somewhat linearly increasing throughput. It might be a bit more since the leftmost lanes can go increasingly faster, but it's nothing like pipes.
So it makes sense to try to think of other ways to handle it... that being said, does having 50 more buses actually reduce anything, 100 more? Trains.
In many cases people will continue to not want to share their space with someone with boobs hanging out, pee all over the seats, weed smell 24/7.
Hmm, so I guess we're just in a stalemate at this point.
> Roads are flat, not stacked, so you're just somewhat linearly increasing throughput.
Per-lane efficiency drops with additional lanes. It doesn't stay the same, and definitely does not increase.
> that being said, does having 50 more buses actually reduce anything, 100 more?
Yes. A typical city transit bus can hold 40 seated people, and a "crush" capacity of about 70. Coach numbers are relatively similar give or take. Typical rush-hour max capacity is probably around 60 which is fairly comfortable.
40-60 people taking up about the space of three cars, instead of (if we're being very gracious) 20 cars, to as many as seventy cars.
If we graciously figure that when stopped in traffic each car is 15 feet (length of a compact SUV) and there is one foot of spacing between them (also gracious), that means anywhere from 320ft to over one thousand feet of lane usage, compressed into about forty feet.
Now think about how much roadway space is used when those vehicles are traveling; those cars have to accordion out to have, say, about one car length between each of them (likely more, but we're being gracious.) Now you're looking at 600 to two thousand feet of lane.
This is why bus-only lanes (either during rush hour or all day) and traffic signal prioritization for busses is gaining popularity in municipalities. One full bus erases two thousand feet worth of cars on that road.
We should be looking at the status quo as "look at how much road capacity is being wasted by single occupant vehicles."
However, busses and trains usually only run every 10-20 minutes compared to a road which is going constantly. I can easily see cars on roads having higher throughput.
It is very easy to scale them as demand increases. There is a train to the next city over where I live in the Netherlands (both around 150k) around 10x per hour on weekdays. And that's on a single, dual track with a mix of 3 direct (intercity) trains and 2 slow trains that have 3 stops inbetween.
The intercity trains, when in a maximum length 6+6 car configuration of 2-floor trains, can carry over 1200 (sitting!) passengers. That's as much as a single lane of road can carry in half an hour with average car occupancy (low). So running such a train every 15 minutes should give a similar capacity to a free-flowing road with 2 lanes, while needing less room for infrastructure. Plus people mostly go to the station by foot, bike or bus rather than car, which is also nice capacity-wise and pollution-wise.
Roads are flat, not stacked, so you're just somewhat linearly increasing throughput. It might be a bit more since the leftmost lanes can go increasingly faster, but it's nothing like pipes.
So it makes sense to try to think of other ways to handle it... that being said, does having 50 more buses actually reduce anything, 100 more? Trains.
In many cases people will continue to not want to share their space with someone with boobs hanging out, pee all over the seats, weed smell 24/7.
Hmm, so I guess we're just in a stalemate at this point.