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It is often noted that typical outer suburban bus routes in Melbourne suffer from poor loadings. This often results in buses that carry mostly "fresh air" making the bus service appear unsuccessful to non bus users.
On Typical outer suburban routes like 681/682. Would it make better sense to use smaller cheaper to operate aircon mini buses?
In addition to using smaller buses they could operate over shorter loop routes of a max 20 mins round trip and thus complete more round trips per day and making these feeder bus loops more viable in the longer term.
Here is a selection of very modern Aircon metro mini buses. These buses are all of Chinese origin and are powered by CNG.
1. Higer KLQ 6608C.
2. Dongfeng.
3. Shaanxi Automobile Group.
The point of this post is to get people thinking about whether operating a standard 12meter diesel bus on a route that rarely sees more than 10 people a trip is the best way of providing a viable mass transport service.
