>>1629958>If there's adequate amounts of buses allocated to each route as well as plenty of spares, what are these great flexibility improvements you speak of? Let's say, you have bus route 1, running from A to B, and bus route 2, running from A to C.
Bus route 1 take 75 minutes to complete a round trip, and bus route 2 take 35 minutes to complete a round trip. Give each trip an additional 5 minutes buffer for traffic/etc. Frequency 15 minutes on both routes.
If they share the same fleet, they would need 8 buses. But if they're separated, route 1 will need 6 buses and route 2 will need 3 buses, meaning an additional bus is needed in total.
Now, let say Route 1 is actually a route to tech park, and Route 2 is actually a route to a campus town of multiple schools, and let say tech workers office hour is usually 10am-6pm while schools usually open 8am-4pm. Let say you need 7.5 minutes frequency in the peak hours, aka half the original frequency. If you let the two routes have each of their own fleet, Route 1 would need 11 buses and route 2 would need 6 buses in the peak hour. Total you need 17 buses. But if you let the two routes share fleet, then since the two routes peak hour doesn't overlap, you can use the three extra buses for peak hour service from Route 2 and shift them to Route 1 after 8pm. In other words only a total of 14 buses will be needed for the combined fleet to cater the peak hour demand.
And then let say you also have a tgird route, Route 3 run from A to D which is a beach, and operate with 60 minutes frequency in the weekdays, and 15 minutes frequencies in the weekends. Let say round trip on the route take 55 minutes. It would have needed 4 buses if it have a separate fleet in its own, but it would have only needed 1 extra buses if you can draw buses for peak hour services from Route 1 and 2 to serve Route 3 in the weekend.
